Timothy F. Geithner

Timothy Franz Geithner is Secretary of the US Treasury, the key position responsible for financial policy in the executive branch of the US federal government. Geithner formally took office in January 26, 2009. Before his appointment as Treasury Secretary, Geithner was President of the New York Federal Reserve and was one of the three principal authors of the 2008 financial bailout.

Record and controversies

Position on Banking Reform Bill

While Geithner has pushed for the banking reform bill, he has not pushed for support of an amendment to the bill banning banks from trading derivatives. "Mr. Geithner, in a letter to Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Blanche Lincoln (D., Ark.), said new financial rules must create restrictions on how over-the-counter derivatives are traded "in order to curb abuses that were at the very center of the financial crisis." But he notably stopped short of endorsing a proposal from Ms. Lincoln to force large banks to spin off derivatives trading businesses entirely." Some suspect that Geithner is trying to push for stronger derivative regulation rather than a full ban. "Mr. Geithner's two-page letter also could be an attempt to steer Ms. Lincoln's bill away from one of its most controversial elements – a requirement that large U.S. banks completely spin off their derivatives trading businesses. While he doesn't address this requirement in his letter, he does specify the exact requirements White House officials believe would accomplish tighter derivatives trading requirements."

Skepticism about regulation

As Treasury Secretary, Geithner has expressed scepticism about regulation. At the House of Representative’s March 2009 hearings on the need for financial regulatory reform, Geithner told Republican Congressman Ron Paul “you are right to say that we have to be very sceptical that regulations can solve all these problems. We have parts of the system that are overwhelmed by regulation, overwhelmed by regulation.” Geithner said that he believed an “economic case can be made” for regulations in one area – limits on bank leverage.

The need for banks to maintain a “strong cushion” against risk has been a recurring theme in Geithner’s speeches. However, when major US banks advocated changes that would allow them to set their own reserve requirements, Geithner backed the banks. According to the New York Times, “As late as 2007, Mr. Geithner advocated measures that government studies said would have allowed banks to lower their reserves. When the crisis hit, banks were vulnerable because their financial cushion was too thin to protect against large losses.”

In their report - “Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America” - Robert Weissman and Harry Rosenfeld explain how investment banks’ “superleverage” helped cause the financial crisis.

As Treasury Secretary, Geithner has expressed scepticism about regulation. At the House of Representative’s March 2009 hearings on the need for financial regulatory reform, Geithner told Republican Congressman Ron Paul “you are right to say that we have to be very sceptical that regulations can solve all these problems. We have parts of the system that are overwhelmed by regulation, overwhelmed by regulation.” Geithner said that he believed an “economic case can be made” for regulations in one area – limits on bank leverage.

The need for banks to maintain a “strong cushion” against risk has been a recurring theme in Geithner’s speeches. However, when major US banks advocated changes that would allow them to set their own reserve requirements, Geithner backed the banks. According to the New York Times, “As late as 2007, Mr. Geithner advocated measures that government studies said would have allowed banks to lower their reserves. When the crisis hit, banks were vulnerable because their financial cushion was too thin to protect against large losses.”

In their report - “Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America” - Robert Weissman and Harry Rosenfeld explain how investment banks’ “superleverage” helped cause the financial crisis.

Views on the “Volcker Rule”

Geithner is reported to have voiced his opposition behind the scenes to the “Volcker Rule”, a regulation Paul Volcker proposed that has the support of President Obama. Volcker is head of the administration’s Economic Recovery Program. The Volcker Rule would prevent banks that enjoy taxpayer guarantees from engaging in high risk behaviour, such as investing in hedge funds.

As Treasury Secretary, Geithner has previously clashed with Obama advisors who wanted more concessions from the banks in exchange for bailouts. The New York Times reported that Geithner “largely prevailed in opposing tougher conditions on financial institutions that were sought by presidential aides, including David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president.”

In a PBS interview the same day Obama announced the Volcker initiative, Geithner appeared to be supporting it. He explained that “the basic principle is that banks that have the privilege of taking advantage of the safety net should not use that to subsidize risky activity.”

Opposition to a Financial Transactions Tax

Geithner is opposed to a financial transactions tax. The idea behind a financial transactions tax is to set a small tax on every financial transaction in order to curb speculation and non-productive trading in financial markets. According to economist Paul Krugman, “It would be a trivial expense for long-term investors, but it would deter much of the churning that now takes place in our hyperactive financial markets.” Krugman says that the tax would have helped to avoid the 2008 financial crisis and could reduce the chances of another one.

In an interview aired on Bloomberg Television, Geithner criticized the transaction tax by saying “I have not seen the version of that that I think works. Firms are going to move in a heartbeat to get around any tax like that.”

UK prime minister Gordon Brown as well as the leaders of France and Germany have come out in favor of a global financial transactions tax. As Secretary of the US Treasury, Geithner’s opposition to the tax undermines the possibility it could ever be implemented. The US position as the leading financial power globally makes American participation in the tax scheme crucial to its success.

Support for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency

As a result of the evident failure of government agencies to protect consumers during the subprime crisis, Geithner has backed creation of a “Consumer Financial Protection Agency”, which would be “an independent executive agency to regulate the provision of consumer financial products or services.” It would be empowered to clamp down on unfair and abusive practices in consumer lending.

In a PBS Frontline investigation into abuses in the credit card industry, Geithner was asked why he had been so aggressive with opponents – such as Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke - of the proposed agency. He replied that “I'd like them to put the interests of the country ahead of the interests of their particular agency because, you know, you can't look at the system and say it's served the American people. It basically failed. And we are engaged in a just and necessary fight to basically change the things that are broken in our system and to reform and put in place a stronger set of protections.”

Controversy over personal tax payments

At the Senate hearings on his confirmation as Treasury Secretary, Geithner apologized for having made “unintentional” mistakes on his taxes for the years 2001 to 2004. Required in 2006 by an IRS audit to pay taxes owed for 2003 and 2004, Geithner did not pay the taxes he also owed for 2001 and 2002 until he became the nominee for Treasury Secretary.

Geithner’s tax problems continue to be raised as he is challenged to defend his record during the bailout. At the January 28, 2010 hearings on the bailout of AIG, Republican Representative John Mica reminded Geithner that he did not think he should have been confirmed as Treasury Secretary because of he had not paid his personal taxes.

Controversy over hiring financial lobbyist

Goldman Sachs has had a history of strong ties to the Treasury Department. Henry Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, was Treasury Secretary under President George W. Bush. Geithner has continued this tradition by naming Mark Patterson – a Goldman Sachs lobbyist – as his chief of staff. Because of new limits President Obama introduced on lobbyists being hired for government jobs, Patterson had to obtain a waiver to take his position at Treasury. Patterson was working as a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs in 2007 when the bank opposed key reform initiatives, including proposals for restraints on executive compensation backed by then-Senator Obama.

Record as President of the New York Federal Reserve

Views on Role of Government in Financial System

Geithner was President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. In that position he had a shared responsibility – along with the Washington-based central Board of Governors and eleven other regional Reserve Banks – for “supervising and regulating banking institutions.” Geithner stated in 2009, however, that “I have never been a regulator, for better or worse.”

William Black, the former Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention, disputes Geithner’s view that he was never responsible for regulating: “Geithner was one of our nation's top regulators during the entire subprime scandal…He took absolutely no effective action. He gave no warning. He did nothing in response to the FBI warning that there was an epidemic of fraud...Well, he may be right that he never regulated, but his job was to regulate. That was his mission statement.”

Geithner’s speeches and papers during the time he was President of the New York Fed did identify critical problems with the financial system, problems that ultimately resulted in the 2008 crisis. For example, in words that seemed to anticipate the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Geithner wrote in 2005: “The degree of concentration at the core of the financial system means that financial institutions have to think more carefully about the implications of the failure of a major counterparty or clearing organization.”

Despite recognizing problems in the financial system, Geithner saw his role primarily as exhorting bankers to voluntarily change their practices. In his view, “Policymakers do not have the capacity to eliminate the risk of excess leverage or asset price misalignments, nor do we have the ability to act preemptively to diffuse them.”

According to Geithner, the most important thing governments could do to avoid financial crises is get monetary policy right, keep debt in check, and react “with sufficient speed and force in the face of those shocks we are unable to avoid.”

Lack of enforcement

As President of the New York Fed, Geithner could have asked the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve either to penalize banks for excessively risky activities or to demand that they stop. But these powers were not used to rein in any of the Wall Street banks during the 2006 to 2008 period when the worst excesses occurred. Geithner’s supervision of Citigroup in particular has been sharply criticized. After Citi’s involvement in the Enron scandal, greater reporting requirements were demanded of it. In 2004 Citigroup was also prohibited from making new acquisitions due to inadequacies in its operations and trading irregularities. These restrictions were lifted in 2006, with the New York Fed claiming the bank had made “significant progress” in risk management. Yet at the time Citigroup had actually plunged into the high risk subprime mortgage market, and “led the buying frenzy on Wall Street, holding $544 billion in securities and derivatives by 2007 before unraveling under their weight.” The New York Fed’s oversight of Citigroup during the period has been called “shamefully lax.” An explanation offered for this lax treatment is “the old boys’ network” within the Federal Reserve. Executives from the major Wall Street banks sit on the New York Federal Reserve’s board. Robert Rubin, an executive with Citigroup, had been on the selection committee for the New York Fed president and had recruited Geithner for the job. One former New York Fed official explained that with this kind of connection “it would be unnatural for Geithner to turn around to any of these guys at Citi and say, ‘Hey, you have a problem.’” A New York Times investigation of Geithner’s day-to-day schedule between 2007 and 2009 when he was New York Fed president revealed he had frequent one-on-one meetings with Wall Street’s top executives. The investigation uncovered the following meetings between Geithner and Citigroup over a one month period: “he met over breakfast with Charles O. Prince, the company’s chief executive at the time, traveled to Citigroup headquarters in Midtown Manhattan to meet with Lewis B. Kaden, the company’s vice chairman, and had coffee with Thomas G. Maheras, who ran some of the bank’s biggest trading operations.”

Role in Bailouts

Geithner’s position as president of the New York Fed “put him at the heart of the global economic crisis as it unfolded in 2008.”Along with Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke and then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Geithner designed the 2008 bank bailout.

Geithner’s overall philosophy to government bank bailouts is “the government has to take risk, and we are going to be doing things which ultimately — in order to get the credit flowing again — are going to benefit the institutions that are at the core of the problem.” A New York Times report on Geithner found that at the height of the crisis he was the one who made the most radical proposals for propping up the banks. The report describes Geithner as “a leading architect of those bailouts, the activist at the head of the pack”. He advocated at one point having the US government guarantee all bank debt, which would have put trillions of taxpayer dollars at risk.

Geithner has been criticized for allowing the collapse of Lehman Brothers. He may, in fact, have wanted to engineer a bailout but been overruled by Paulson and Bernanke.

In 2008, Geithner insisted that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insure the debt of bank holding companies without charging financial institutions anything for this benefit. He opposed collecting a levy from banks and investment companies in exchange for government guarantees of their loans. But the FDIC’s chair, Sheila Bair, successfully argued that a fee had to be charged since the FDIC – and potentially the US taxpayer - would bear the costs of defaults. 1.2.4 Role in the AIG Bailout In January 2010, Geithner was called before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to testify on the bailout of AIG. The Chair of the Committee, Democratic Representative Edolphus Towns, said the focus would be on how billions of government bailout funds were used to fully compensate major banks like Goldman Sachs for their contracts with AIG. Towns said in an interview: “I really want to find out what led them to pay 100 percent to the counterparties.”

Geithner had already come under fire for not constraining the huge bonuses paid to AIG executives after the company had been effectively nationalized by the US government. He was also criticized for the New York Fed’s instructions to AIG to alter its corporate filings to eliminate mention of payments made to banks after it had been bailed out. Geithner said though that he had “no role” in this kind of decision after he was nominated to be Treasury Secretary.

Geithner’s testimony on AIG emphasized the extreme situation the US faced at the height of the 2008 financial crisis. He said that “the United States risked a complete collapse of our financial system”. He characterized the Fed’s role as being limited to rescuing the system in times of extreme stress – failure to keep AIG from getting into trouble in the first place was the fault of insurance company regulators. Geithner argued that the government could not let AIG fail because of its key role in providing life insurance and other essential insurance services to millions of Americans, businesses, and local governments. This was the regulated side of its business. In words critical of the shadow financial system, Geithner said: “More ominously, AIG’s parent holding company, which was largely unregulated, engaged in a broad range of financial activities that strayed well beyond the business of life insurance and property and casualty insurance… Such excessive risk-taking should not have been allowed.”

The riskiest aspect of AIG’s operations was insuring financial institutions against defaults on debt secured by subprime loans. AIG was able to engage in this activity – which Geithner described as “complex and dangerous” - because it enjoyed a strong credit rating based on its conventional insurance operations. When the problems in the mortgage market became clear, however, AIG’s rating dropped. Banks demanded billions from AIG as collateral on their mortgage-related contracts. These demands from the banks helped push AIG over the edge. With AIG in danger of collapse the Fed provided an $85 billion line of credit. Subsequent interventions would bring the total taxpayer commitment to AIG to $180 billion. Some of those billions went not to strengthening AIG’s balance sheet but to pay off in full the collateral demands made by financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and the French bank Societe Generale.

In his testimony on the AIG bailout, Geithner said the Fed had no choice but to allow this money to be paid out because there would have been a loss of confidence in AIG if the banks had been forced to take less than what their contracts said they were entitled to. Others such as economist Paul Krugman dispute this, and say that the New York Fed could have worked out a better deal for the taxpayer.

Simon Johnson, a former IMF economist, also disagrees with Geithner’s claim about the necessity of the AIG payments. Johnson says “the transaction represented a windfall gain for Goldman shareholders and insiders – rather than something that in any sense ‘saved the day’ for the financial system.”

Supporter of Globalization

Negotiator of the WTO’s Financial Service Agreement

Geithner was one of two lead US negotiators responsible for the establishment in 1998 of the WTO’s Financial Services Agreement, an agreement originally conceived of by AIG in the 1970’s. Geithner, who was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Department at the time, and Deputy US Trade Representative Jeffrey Lang collaborated to achieve the shared goals of the US financial industry and government. Through the agreement, US financial companies gained the WTO-guaranteed right to trade internationally in risky products like derivatives and to hold majority ownership of banks and insurance companies in foreign countries. The agreement also locked in the administration’s commitment to deregulate the US financial sector by eliminating the Glass-Steagall Act.

The US withheld its consent to a WTO financial services agreement until five years after the WTO was founded. It only signed when other countries had made enough concessions to satisfy US demands that markets be opened to its banks and insurance companies. At the very last stages of the negotiations, US negotiators Geithner and Lang threatened to hold up the agreement again if the interests of AIG in the Malaysian market were not met.

When the Financial Services Agreement was finalized, Geithner gave a speech to the US Coalition of Service Industries. He praised this trade lobby – founded by AIG, Citicorp, and American Express – for the “critical role” they had played in getting the agreement. He said that it had been his job at Treasury in 1988 to write the first draft of the agreement. His strategy to get the final agreement included establishing “very effective cooperation with the U.S. financial community” in defining priorities. Geithner also made the WTO financial deal a “central issue” in every meeting Treasury had with key foreign finance ministers.

Project Director of “Building Support for More Open Trade”

Geithner has been described as “an unabashed supporter of open markets and free trade” and as a strong voice within the Obama administration for expanding trade agreements. Geithner promoted the global interests of US financial institutions as Treasury’s negotiator for international financial services agreements. In addition, in advocating continued US government funding for the International Monetary Fund, Geithner explained that the IMF worked as a “powerful force for trade liberalization around the world.”>

In 2001, Geithner was named project director of a task force established by the Council on Foreign Relations on ways to increase domestic support for free trade and have Congress grant President Bush Trade Promotion Authority. The task force included Robert Rubin, advisor to Citigroup and former Treasury Secretary; Kenneth Duberstein, a former chief of staff for Ronald Reagan; and Carla Hills and Charlene Barshevsky, both former US Trade Representatives. The task force report recommended reducing the political opposition to free trade by: implementing “an extensive, ongoing program of education on the positive effects of trade”; taking a gradualist approach and getting approvals for a series of bilateral agreements; emphasizing the “pro-development” potential of the agreements in order to appeal to US groups concerned about world poverty; and linking Trade Promotion Authority votes with popular initiatives such as programs for displaced workers.

Role in Asia’s Financial Crisis

During the Bush era, the New York Post described Geithner as a “financial braniac” and someone who had acted as “Uncle Sam’s golden boy emissary” during the late 1999’s Asian financial crisis. However, now that Geithner is Treasury Secretary, the Post has published a sharp critique of his role in that crisis. The Cato Institute’s Mark Calabria wrote in the Post that the IMF rescue Geithner engineered for Asian economies helped US banks cut their losses. Calabria claimed: “If there's a common thread to almost every bank bailout over the last 15 years, it's that Timothy Geithner was always somewhere in the room.”

Affiliations

Personal

Robert Rubin – Rubin has been Chair of Goldman Sachs, US Treasury Secretary, and Senior Counselor and Director of Citigroup. He was Geithner’s boss and mentor while he was at the Treasury Department, and he recommended Geithner for the position of the New York Fed President.

Sandy Weill – The former CEO of Citigroup recommended in 2007 that Geithner become the bank’s CEO, a position Geithner declined to apply for. Weill appointed him as a director of the National Academy Foundation, a charity founded and chaired by Weill.

Lawrence Summers – The current head of the National Economic Council, was Geithner’s mentor at the Treasury Department when Summers was Treasury Secretary.

Organizational

• Member, Group of Thirty
• Former Director, Peterson Institute for International Economics, http://www.iie.com/
• Former Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations, http://www.cfr.org/publication/17860/timothy_geithner_us_treasury_secretary.html
• Former Director, Center for Global Development, http://www.cgdev.org/content/enews/detail/967387
• Former Member, Board of Trustees, Rand Corporation, http://www.rand.org/news/press/2008/11/24/geithner.html
• Former Director, National Academy Foundation, http://naf.org/

Background info

Geithner was born on August 18, 1961 in New York. He grew up in the US but as well in other countries including India, Thailand, and Zimbabwe where his father worked on international development for the Ford Foundation He graduated with a BA from Dartmouth College, and an MA in international economics and East Asian studies from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Upon graduation, Geithner worked for Kissinger and Associates for three years. He was hired by the Treasury Department in 1988 and worked there until 2001 when he was hired as a director of the International Monetary Fund. From 2003 to 2009, Geithner was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before he was named Treasury Secretary in the Obama administration.

Contact details

The Real Economy Project needs your help filling this section out. Here's how.

Articles and Resources

Related SourceWatch Articles

• Barack Obama/Appointments and nominations as President

External Articles

• “Geithner, Member and Overseer of Finance Club”, The New York Times, April 26, 2009.

• Robert Weissman and Harry Rosenfeld, “Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America”
• “In Geithner We Trust Eludes Treasury as Market Fails to Recover”, Bloomberg News, February 25, 2009.

Glenn Greenwald, “Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Wall Street's ownership of government”, Salon, April 4, 2009

Testimony and Speeches by Timothy Geithner

Geithner speeches as Treasury Secretary http://www.ustreas.gov/press/speeches.html Geithner speeches as President of the New York Federal Reserve http://www.newyorkfed.org/newsevents/speeches/index.html Geithner statements http://www.ustreas.gov/press/statements.html Geithner testimony http://www.ustreas.gov/press/testimony.html