Sunday, July 27, 2014

Timothy Geithner: A Regulator Beholden to a Bank?

In her article in The New York Times, Gretchen Morgenson raises the possibility that Tim Geithner, president of the New York Federal Reserve from 2003 to early 2009 and U.S. Treasury Secretary during Obama’s first term, was a captured regulator, “a man locked into the mind-set of the very bankers he was supposed to oversee.”[1] I contend that while a shared mindset was part of the mix, he was actively doing the bidding of Wall Street, and one bank in particular, which he owed big time. That is to say, it is not just that he worked with Republicans such as Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Fed, and Henry Paulson, Bush’s Treasury Secretary. There is more to it in him being portrayed throughout his confirmation hearing for Treasury as “a tool of Wall Street.”[2]





[1] Gretchen Morgenson, “Geithner, Staying on Script,The New York Times, May 17, 2014.
[2] Timothy Geithner, Stress Test (Random House: New York, 2014), p. 2.