"Stress Test" Reviewed: Tim Geithner Is "A Grifter, A Petty Con Artist"

Zero Hedge

Geithner is at heart a grifter, a petty con artist with the right manners and breeding to lie at the top echelons of American finance at a moment when the government and financial services industry needed someone to be the face of their multi-trillion dollar three card monte. He’s going to make his money, now that he’s done living his life of fantastic power after his upbringing of remarkable mysterious privilege. After reading this book and documenting lie after lie after lie, I’m convinced that there’s more here than just a self-serving corrupt official. There’s an entire culture, of figures at Treasury, the Federal Reserve, in the entire Democratic Party elite structure, and in the world of journalism, a culture in which Geithner is seen as some sort of role model.

- From Matt Stoller’s fantastic article published yesterday, The Con-Artist Wing of the Democratic Party

Timothy Geithner is likely to go down in American history as one of the most dangerous, destructive cronies to have ever wielded government power. The man is so completely and totally full of shit it’s almost impossible not to notice.

The last thing I’d ever want to do in my free time is read a lengthy book filled with Geithner lies and propaganda, so I owe a large debt of gratitude to former Congressional staffer Matt Stoller for doing it for me. Stoller simply tears Geither apart limb from limb, detailing obvious lies about the financial crisis, and even more interestingly, Geithner’s bizarre bio, replete with mysterious and inexplicable promotions into positions of power.
So without further ado, here are some excerpts from this excellent article. From Vice:

The most consequential event of this young century has been the financial crisis. This is a catchall term that means three different things: an economic housing boom and bust, a financial meltdown, and a political response in which bailouts were showered upon the very institutions that were responsible for the chaos.

More than anyone else, it was then US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner who shaped this response, and who bears praise, blame, and responsibility for the outcome. And finally, with the release of his book, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, Geithner is getting to tell his side of the bailout story.

I’ll address both of these, since they are intertwined. For as I read the book, and compared the book with what was written at the time and what was written afterwards, I noticed something odd, and perhaps too bold to say in polite company. As much as I really wanted to hear what Geithner had to say, I quickly realized that I wasn’t getting his actual side of the story. The book is full of narratives, facts, and statements that are, well, untrue, or at the very least, highly misleading. Despite its length, there are also serious omissions that suggest an intention to mislead, as well as misrepresentations of his critics’ arguments. As I went further into Geithner’s narrative, even back into his college days, I got the sense that I was seeing only a brilliantly scrubbed surface, that there were nooks and crannies hidden away. It struck me that I was reading the memoirs of an incredibly savvy and well-bred grifter, the kind that the American WASP establishment of financiers, foundation officials, and spies produces in such rich abundance. I realize this is a bold claim, because it’s an indictment not just of Geithner but also of those who worked for him at Treasury and at the Federal Reserve, as well as indictment of the Clinton-era finance team of Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan, Michael Barr, Jason Furman, and other accomplices. That’s why this review is somewhat long, as it’s an attempt to back up such a broad and sweeping claim. I will also connect it to what Geithner is doing now: working in the same kind of financial business that made Mitt Romney a near billionaire.

There are a few glaring problems with how Geithner portrays this debate. First of all, his main foil during the crisis was a fellow technocrat, former International Monetary Fund (IMF) official Simon Johnson, who actually had significant crisis-management experience parachuting into panicked countries and imposing structural reform on their bankers. Johnson became increasingly irate as he saw Geithner diverge from what Geithner himself at the US Treasury and the IMF forced on other countries: conditions. Geithner was hard on oligarchs when they were foreign, but when it was US bankers, well, then the wall of money argument triumphed. In fact, in a paper released in 2013, it was revealed that financial firms with a personal relationship with Geithner himself saw an abnormal 15% bump in share prices when Geithner’s name was floated for Treasury Secretary, and a corresponding though smaller, abnormal decline when his nomination was on the rocks due to his being caught not paying taxes by Senate investigators.

The third problem is housing. Economists Amir Sufi and Atif Mian lead the charge in arguing that the Geithner strategy failed to restart the economy because it focused on leverage at the large banks rather than leverage among households, i.e., foreclosures. The shape of the Geithner policy architecture is two-tiered: The financiers recovered; everyone else did not. And the economy, even today, sputters along at just above stall speed because of this.

But the book is more than just a set of arguments; it’s also an autobiography of a man. And while I was reading it, I kept getting the feeling I wasn’t learning the full story. I noticed oddities, a kind of set of shimmering ephemera which suggest that there was something the author was holding just out of view of the reader. 

Geithner talks about his childhood growing up abroad, with high-powered family members who had advised presidents, and a father who was a senior executive at the Ford Foundation in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 70s. At that time, the Ford Foundation was a pivotal instrument of US foreign policy, an important vehicle for anti-Communist efforts and heavily integrated into the financial and foreign policy establishment (the head of the foundation even set up an internal committee to organize incoming requests from the CIA). Yet Geithner portrays himself as a largely apolitical and directionless kid, a sort of ordinary person in unusual circumstances, with loving parents. It was an odd way to describe growing up cocooned in the foreign-policy elite. Geithner is far too smart to not have been able to observe what was going on around him, yet he is silent in the book on how he saw power up close at a young age.

Ok, this is really important and something I touched on in my piece: Tim Geithner Admits “Too Big To Fail” Hasn’t Gone Anywhere (and that’s the way he likes it). As I note in that post, I find it beyond coincidental that Tim Geithner’s father and Barack Obama’s mother both worked at the Ford Foundation in Indonesia at the same time. 

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