Neil Irwin mulls the question:
Mr. Geithner spent his youth largely abroad and his early adulthood working on international trade and economics in the United States Treasury Department. Only starting in 2003 did he have much of anything to do with the financial industry, and that was as its overseer at the helm of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He is now the president of Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm, but he has held that job for all of 10 weeks. He was never an investment banker like his predecessors Hank Paulson and Robert Rubin, or even a hedge fund consultant like Larry Summers.
As far back as college, as he puts it in his new memoir, “I had never thought of finance as a particularly special or prestigious profession.” All of which makes the fact that he earned a reputation as a tool of big financial interests that much more intriguing. After covering Mr. Geithner for the better part of a decade and reading the memoir, I think here’s the best way to make sense of him: Timothy Geithner isn’t captured by Wall Street. He’s captured by working within systems as they exist.
Sheiber puts forward a different theory:
What always bothered me about Geithner, and which Sorkin’s piece draws out, is that he often seemed more dedicated to the banks than the bankers were to their own cause. While reporting my book about Obama’s economic team, plenty of bankers confided to me that the bailouts were shockingly generous. Many of them tended to take a “these f—king guys” view of their colleagues and puzzled over how Geithner could be so deferential. It made me suspect Geithner would have been much more of a hard-ass had he spent a few years toiling on Wall Street before joining government.
Instead, as Geithner tells Sorkin, “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.” Bummer for the rest us. But I guess that means at least one good thing may come out of Geithner’s recent move to Wall Street: He’ll actually get to know the place this time.
Andrew Huszar wishes that Geithner had more strongly reformed the financial services industry:
[L]ooking out at the U.S. economy little more than five years after Mr. Geithner’s becoming U.S. Treasury Secretary, what do we see? The more things are said to have changed, the more they’ve stayed the same. Nursed back to health by massive government support, the U.S. financial sector is once again America’s largest enterprise, accounting for more than 30 percent of the nation’s corporate profits. Moreover, Wall Street’s six biggest banks—the so-called “too big to fail” ones—have gotten 37 percent bigger.
The Dish 