The New York Times’ monumental profile of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is pretty disturbing.
Despite Geithner’s clear pattern of getting too close to the bankers he was supposed to be regulating during his time as president of the New York Fed, he still manages to come across as a man of integrity. So that’s not the issue.
Rather, the issue is that Geithner came to trust those bankers far more than he should have, a mindset that led him to get it wrong consistently.
It seems pretty clear that President Obama would have been better served by an outsider, albeit one with the technical expertise to see us through the financial crisis. Geithner’s got the technical expertise, but is simply too close to see the big picture.