Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Those watching the Wall Street-Washington regulatory battles over the years are well aware that there is no love lost between former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and former FDIC chair Sheila Bair. While Tim is now out making the rounds promoting his new book, Stress Test, Bair takes the opportunity to offer some faint praise but also some glancing and direct hits.
In what I would qualify as deftly slipping  a punch, Bair actually recommends Geithner’s book. In doing so, though, she then proceeds to lay Tim and his cohorts out with a serious warning we all should heed.
In a Sense on Cents Instant Classic, Bair provides a must read review of Geithner’s tome at CNN Fortune: CNN Fortune: :
In his new book, Stress Test, former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner says nice things about me, kind of. For the most part, he fairly recounts our disagreements during the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath. If you share my skepticism of the bailouts and their generosity, you will think well of the positions I took. If you share his world view that we were justified in throwing trillions at the big banks to “save the system,†you will not. Wherever readers come out, Tim’s book has reinvigorated a much-needed debate about whether our financial system should be based on a paradigm of bailouts or on one of accountability.
Though the vast majority of Americans favor the latter, Washington’s love affair with big finance continues. Regulators and politicians may spout a good line about ending “too big to fail,†but their actions speak louder than their talking points. Financial reform has been tepid. The hard work to force mega-banks to raise more capital, replace their unstable short-term funding with long-term debt, and simplify their legal structures is at best, half-done.
But who can blame the regulators for being timid when members of both parties in Congress seem to value campaign contributions over system stability?
