Mar 10, 2010

"Congress members accuse Timothy Geithner of coddling Wall Street. Wall Street accuses him of abetting socialism. Yet when the history books are written, Geithner will be recognized as Barack Obama’s key lieutenant in the struggle to right the economy and fix the finance system.

Economically, Geithner’s plan has worked better and more cheaply than anyone could have imagined a year ago. Politically, it threatens to undermine Obama’s presidency. Is Geithner a courageous public servant doing the right thing? Or have his years as a player in global finance made him loath to change an industry that needs fundamental reform?

Last October, on the day after the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed above 10,000 for the first time since the economy had collapsed a year before, Timothy Geithner appeared at a conference put on by The Economist, deep in Manhattan’s financial district. Geithner was then, and remains, an enormously disputed figure for his central role in shaping the government’s response to the crisis, first as president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and now as President Obama’s Treasury secretary. In some quarters of Washington, he is viewed as a fully housebroken abettor of Wall Street, the man who, from his perch at the Fed, conspired with Henry Paulson, the previous Treasury secretary and former chairman of Goldman Sachs, to sluice trillions of taxpayers’ dollars to what were once called “the malefactors of great wealth.” In Congress, Geithner is the rare subject on which some Republicans and Democrats can manage to agree: they agree he should resign. Since Geithner’s disastrous public debut in February 2009 with a speech outlining the White House’s plan to stop the crisis—the market responded by dropping 382 points—bashing him has become the preferred means of registering one’s outrage about the economy without actually committing to a course of action."

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