Over the past couple of weeks former Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner has been doing the round on the talk-show circuit promoting his new book, ‘Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises’.
With this book Geithner attempts to set the record straight on why the bailout was necessary and without it, the financial crises would have been much worse.
The bailout of the financial industry is one of those topics that rub both Conservatives and Liberals the wrong way and has earned Geithner critics on both sides of the aisle. Geithner to his credit does not run from his critics and strongly believes that he and the Obama Administration did everything within their power to stave off financial disaster.
In one of the better interviews Geithner participated in was on ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’ (5/20). In a 42-minute interview that had some light moments, Geithner and Stewart went back and forth on conveying their point of views.
For Geithner, this discussion will always be difficult as populous opinion just sees the bailout as “Big Banks” being saved while “Joe Public” was left to fail and foreclosed on. In a funny but honest moment Geithner admits to understanding why people are mad, but at the same time saying it was still necessary…
“Because we did this set of frankly pretty offensive, seemingly unfair set of things, we have an economy that is, again terrible, hard, a lot of challenges, but much, much better, than what it would have been.”
Stewart in great fashion stayed on message, his belief is that we would have been better off if the government bailed out the people and focused on saving people from foreclosure on their homes. That would have led to the people having more money to spend and keep the economy going.
“Economies are perception. So your reality of, but we avoided a depression, doesn’t fit the reality of people’s perception that they haven’t avoided their own personal depression…”
The best part of this conversation is that both men were open to listening to each other’s viewpoint.
If haven’t peeped the full length interview checkout the link below.
As always….
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