Geithner, Staying on Script
Timothy F. Geithner, the former Treasury secretary, drew a large and respectful crowd last Wednesday at a Barnes & Noble store in Manhattan, where he was publicizing 'Stress Test,' his new memoir about the financial crisis. Mr. Geithner left little to chance at the event: It consisted of a highly scripted chat with a friendly interviewer who screened audience questions. After an hour, Mr. Geithner was whisked from the building.
The audience seemed to buy his story: He acknowledged that the 2008 bank rescues he helped engineer were unfair and offensive because they rewarded the very people who had created the disaster, but he defended them as stabilizing the economy and, ultimately, helping all Americans.
'We weren't perfect,' he said. 'It was messy. We had to learn as we went along.'
Mr. Geithner wrote his book, he said, to honor the people who worked with him during the conflagration at both the Federal Reserve and at the Treasury.
But he had other goals: to make clear that he felt his course was the right one for the nation, to apologize for not having seen the crisis coming as a financial overseer and, perhaps most important, to convince people that he was not in the pocket of the banks he rescued.
The book, which is readable and revealing, achieves some of this.
One on one, Mr. Geithner can come across as arrogant; but on these pages he's self-effacing. He recounts frequent 'empathy mistakes' that he made at Treasury, such as interrupting a low-income housing advocate amid her impassioned description of the human toll of the foreclosure crisis.
He also acknowledges that he was an inept public speaker, saying his first speech as Treasury secretary was a disaster.
'I swayed back and forth, like an unhappy passenger on an unsteady ship,' he writes. 'I kept peering around the teleprompter to look directly at the audience, which apparently made me look shifty; one commentator said I looked like a shoplifter.'
But his book is less successful in making the case that he cared as much for troubled borrowers as he did for reckless banks. And he fails to answer one of the most crucial questions about the crisis: How did he and his regulatory colleagues at the Fed, with their army of researchers and high-powered economists, miss the immense and obvious buildup of risk in the financial system that led to the crisis?
Mr. Geithner insists that everything he did during the crisis was intended to protect the citizenry and not the banks. By saving the nation's financial system, he argues, he and his colleagues staved off economic Armageddon.
Perhaps. But this leaves no room for a middle ground, a series of actions that would have averted catastrophe while awarding Main Street with the same attention and generosity that was heaped on Wall Street.
Mr. Geithner repeatedly says his many critics never offered really workable alternatives to resolve the mess. Maybe so, but he gives little indication that he would have been willing to entertain alternatives offered from outside his circle - another empathy mistake.
Mr. Geithner acknowledges missing signs of the coming cataclysm during his tenure as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But he gives himself credit for making speeches in which he warned of potential risks in the system.
These speeches had little effect, though, and it's easy to see why. Consider a March 2007 address that he highlights. 'I gave several reasons why everyone involved with subprime mortgages, as well as securities backed by subprime mortgages, ought to be concerned about 'what we might call the adverse tail, or the negative extreme,' ' he writes.
Not exactly a 911 call.
As for the oversight mistakes that he and his regulatory colleagues made, Mr. Geithner essentially says 'We were human.' But this fails to address head-on the possibility that he was a captured regulator, a man locked into the mind-set of the very bankers he was supposed to oversee.
For example, Mr. Geithner writes that in his early days as president of the New York Fed - he began in 2003 - he had deep concerns about the sufficiency of bank capital levels. Yet he didn't require these institutions to fatten their capital cushions before the debacle.
'I hadn't pushed the Federal Reserve in Washington to change the rules to raise regulatory capital requirements,' he writes, 'because those rules were then mired in protracted international negotiations.'
Last week, I asked Sheila C. Bair, the former chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, for her recollection of these events. She replied with an email recalling that in 2006, she attended her first Basel Committee meeting, the international negotiations that Mr. Geithner was referring to. While there, she pushed unsuccessfully to raise bank capital levels.
Why was she unsuccessful? 'I was actively undermined by the Fed, the New York Fed and the comptroller of the currency,' she said. 'I later complained to Tim about the way his representative on the Basel Committee had undermined me. He was unapologetic.'
(A spokeswoman for Mr. Geithner said that he and Ms. Bair have 'disagreed at times on the optimal design' for bank capital. But the spokeswoman asserted that he 'was never in favor of weaker capital standards.')
His dealings with executives at Citigroup, a bank overseen by the New York Fed, are Exhibit A for regulatory capture. While he notes that the New York Fed banned Citi from making major acquisitions in 2005 after illegal activity was found in its Japan operations, he does not mention that a year later his colleagues lifted the ban, wrongly persuaded that the bank had fixed its internal controls.
Mr. Geithner writes repeatedly that Citi's risks were hidden from its regulators. But did he want to see them? His close associations with Citi officials may have blinded him - he was on a charity board with Sanford I. Weill, the creator of Citigroup; was an acolyte of Robert E. Rubin, the former vice chairman; and had frequent meetings with the bank's top officials as the credit storm gathered.
Mr. Geithner does do some introspection. 'I did not view Wall Street as a cabal of idiots or crooks,' he writes. 'My jobs mostly exposed me to talented senior bankers, and selection bias probably gave me an impression that the U.S. financial sector was more capable and ethical than it really was.' That's as close as he gets to saying that he was wrong to trust - not question - bankers he encountered.
A final flaw: In his book, Mr. Geithner boasts that the bailouts he helped design have been profitable to taxpayers. But his calculations do not take into account the cost of capital that the taxpayers extended to the banks.
We were the lenders of last resort and should have been paid an enormous premium for the use of our money. We were not.
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