Check out all these at least somewhat-critical quotes:
On Wall Street, meanwhile, where Geithner’s stock has been falling precipitously for weeks, a prominent Democratic banker (and Obama backer) told me, “It’s not that everyone here thinks he should be fired. It’s just that there’s no one who would stand up right now and publicly throw their support behind him.”
“Tim and Barack might have been able to get away with ‘Trust me on the details’—except that they were following Paulson, who asked to be trusted so many times and then changed directions that no one was going to trust any Treasury secretary on the details,” remarks a senior executive at one of Wall Street’s biggest banks. “And then here comes Tim and says, ‘Trust me on the details.’ Oy vey.”
The situation was exacerbated by the paucity of senior staff at Treasury, which has made it nearly impossible for Wall Street to talk to Geithner’s shop: “There is no one there to answer the phone,” says one executive. “Literally.”
To some in the White House, the sight of the financial world turning hard against Geithner is curious, even baffling. What the Obamans thought they were getting in him was Wall Street’s guy. “They don’t get it,” says one name-brand Democratic banker. “Geithner was a $500,000-a-year guy. He was the regulator. People knew him, liked him fine, but he was never a member of the club.”
Back in New York the following day, I related that story to a CEO pal of mine who is a big Obama backer. “What are they, smoking crack down there?” he replied. “Find me one CEO who likes what they’re doing. Seriously, find me one!”
“I heard [Obama budget director] Peter Orszag on TV saying health care is the biggest problem affecting the economy,” says one Democratic CEO. “No, it’s not. Right now, of the top ten things they should be focused on, it’s like, No. 11; the first ten are the banks.”
Obama has made this argument on several occasions now, but it made its debut when he addressed the Business Roundtable earlier this month. It was one of those occasions where the venue for the message mattered nearly as much as the message itself. “What it said to me was, they know they have a problem with business, that they’re not in la-la land about that any more,” explained another Obama-friendly executive in the city. “But unless they fix the banks, nothing else matters. That’s what everyone is waiting for.”
I don't believe in the old saying that if you don't have anything nice to say, you shouldn't say it all. But if you're going to say it, at least have a big enough SD* to put your name behind it**.
*Yes, I realize some of these could be women, but the blog works better this way.
** To be fair, the political types quoted were just as bad in hiding behind anonymity (although not all the quotes were critical).
When the financial crisis hit in September, Furman put Summers in charge of doing the opening presentation on Obama’s economic conference calls, which took place daily (at least) during that pivotal time. “Larry was just brilliant on those calls,” recalls one regular participant. “And not just brilliant but inclusive and generous—he was very rarely as assholic as he had a reputation for being.”
Obama also heard from many Summers opponents. “The problem was, 50 percent of the people Obama asked about Summers said no fucking way—between the confirmation hurdles and the arrogance problem,” says this person, who was asked. “But everyone said he had to have Larry at the table. And Obama had really come to respect him. The funny thing is, Barack barely knew Tim; they’d only met a couple times, there was no relationship there.”
“I went through battle after battle with Tim, and he’s quite remarkable,” says a former Treasury official from the Paulson era. “He’s a very strong leader. He’s smart, he’s tenacious, he works harder than anyone. There were countless times when Paulson and Ben Bernanke were focused on academic discussions and Tim was the one who brought things back to reality.”
(Some suggested putting former Fed chairman Paul Volcker in the job for a year, with Geithner as his deputy and successor in waiting.) “I have great respect for Tim,” says one of them. “But I thought he lacked the gravitas for the job, the ability to be a commanding figure, to get on TV and have people take one look at him and say, ‘Yeah, he’s the man.’ ”
A longtime Geithner ally in Washington comes to a different conclusion. “A lot of the pushback he’s getting from Wall Street is about their lack of self-awareness about how the world has changed, how they’re not the Masters of the Universe anymore,” this person argues. “They feel marginalized and put-upon by the administration’s rhetoric about the greedy bankers. They are way behind the curve about where the public is and how much pressure the administration is feeling. They don’t like what the new environment means for how they run their business. They see their taxes going up and their compensation going down. And what they don’t do is go to the New York Times and say, ‘My feelings are hurt. I don’t like what the new president is saying about our character and our competence.’ What they say is, ‘These guys are incompetent, we need a real policy, the Treasury secretary has got an unsteady hand—he’s not up to the job.’ They’re thinking one thing and saying something quite different.”
When I was at the White House recently, I jokingly asked a senior Obama official if the team was having fun turning the country into a socialist state. “What are you talking about?” this official replied. “Business loves what we’re doing!”
Was Volcker placated? Maybe only momentarily. “He wants to have a real role,” says someone who knows him. “If they’re gonna call him an Obama adviser, he wants to really advise. He has no interest in just being window dressing.”
“All I can tell you,” says one administration official, “is that Larry seems quite happy with this part of the policy portfolio being known as the Geithner Plan.”
The truth, in the end, is that whatever emerges will be perceived as the Obama plan. And the president is apparently deeply uncomfortable with nationalization. “Barack’s perspective is, if you do one bank, what happens to the next weaker one and the next one and the next one?” explains someone with his ear on economics. “Where do you draw the line? How far do you end up going? What are the repercussions?” Obama, notes this person, is risk-averse in his decision-making. “He wants to know in advance the likely outcome. So he’s saying to Tim and Larry, let’s play it out—and there is no solid answer. If you do Citi, you can’t be sure what that means for B of A. You’re not sure whether Goldman and Morgan can survive as just investment banks. That level of uncertainty is something that, for them, is really hard to swallow.”
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