Timothy F. Geithner > Quotes

“you cannot enjoy the light without enduring the heat.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“you can’t judge a decision by how it turns out, only by whether it made sense given the information available at the time.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“Financial stability cannot depend on omniscient supervisors identifying and preemptively defusing any potential source of crisis; it requires safeguards that can help the system withstand the force of a severe storm, and tools the government can use to limit the damage.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“Plan beats no plan. Bad options are better than no options”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“[Hyperinflation is] not going to happen in this country, will never happen... [The Fed putting so much money into the system is] not going to create the risk of hyperinflation in the future. We have a strong independent Federal Reserve with a very strong mandate from the Congress, and they will do what's necessary to keep inflation low and stable over time.”
― Timothy Geithner

“wouldn’t engage, except to say that all the Bush tax cuts should be extended, and that our proposals were “job killing.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“The U.S. government had sent a message that creditors of U.S. financial institutions were not safe, precisely the wrong message to send at a time of peril. Wachovia’s creditors were so unnerved they demanded repayment of half the bank’s long-term debt that day, trying to call in more than $50 billion in loans.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“The widespread perceptions that we were too close to financial interests were harming our efforts to craft a legislative coalition.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“And despite my efforts to escape, I am glad he compelled me to stay for his full first term.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“In the media, in the public, even in the financial community, we faced withering skepticism about our motives as well as our competence.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“I felt envious of the clarity of his argument, whatever the quality of the legal reasoning.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“but I knew that praise from markets could be fleeting, and was not always evidence of good policy.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“In fact, there's nothing wrong with letting a crisis burn for a while, as long as you have the ability to contain it before it rages out of control.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“But I took too much comfort in analyses downplaying the risk of large nationwide declines, which hadn’t happened in the United States since the Depression.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“I hadn’t sought the job, and I had no aspirations for another job in public life,”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“At the time, my staff and I had been too consumed with trying to contain the post-Lehman panic to even consider whether we could do anything about executive compensation.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“Many details will remain opaque at initial launch.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“Understand the politics, but don’t let it get in the way of figuring out the best policy on the merits.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“I tried to be disciplined about focusing on the problems in front of us, thinking about ways we could help make things better, trying to anticipate where the fire would spread next.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“Hank ended up getting on his knees to beg Speaker Pelosi not to abandon the bill”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“It turned out that things had to get a lot worse before Congress would even consider expanding our authority to make things better,”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“We endured seemingly endless stretches when global finance was on the edge of collapse, when we had to make monumental decisions in a fog of uncertainty, when our options all looked dismal but we still had to choose. If I had learned one thing from previous crises, it was the importance of humility—about our ability to figure out exactly what was going on, and our ability to parachute in with a simple solution.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“The Countrywide episode foreshadowed much of what came later in the crisis.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“We tried to push back against the frenzy, but our impact was modest.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“I put too much of a burden on Carole, and too much of their lives happened without me.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“Saving Fannie and Freddie not only avoided catastrophe, defusing two of our financial bombs; it laid some groundwork for recovery.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“On Friday, July 11, Americans saw an actual bank run--not a metaphorical run, like the digital withdrawals that had crushed Bear, but a physical run on a physical bank, as in It's a Wonderful Life. That afternoon, the Office of Thrift Supervision and the FDIC shut down and seized IndyMac, a California thrift that was once part of Angelo Mozilo's Countrywide empire. IndyMac had flourished during the bubble by providing exotic mortgages to buyers without much in the way of income or assets. Its balance sheet was loaded with option adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs), an almost comically irresponsible product that let borrowers choose their monthly payments, adding to their future obligations if they wanted to pay less at the moment.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“I called Ben, Don, and Hank to try to convince them to turn Sheila around.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“I gently pointed out that it seemed a bit early in my career for that job.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises

“I don’t know what I would do,” I said. “But I’m sure we can do more than we’re doing now.”
― Timothy F. Geithner, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises