Larry Summers’ Contradictory and Dishonest Defense of Administration’s Bank-Focused Crisis Response

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Yves Smith

If you are going to succeed in rewriting history, a necessary condition is that the public doesn’t remember it very well. Unfortunately, that requirement is not in place for the architects of the Administration’s blatantly bank-friendly crisis responses.

Timothy Geithner’s book Stress Test, in which he tries selling the idea that rescuing the banks was unsavory but necessary, and wanting to hold individuals accountable was a mere desire vengeance, is not only doing poorly in terms of sales, but is producing pushback on multiple fronts. Not only have quite a few reviewers taken issue with Geithner’s sense of priorities and his factual claims, but he’s gotten raspberries from the public. If you look at the one-star Amazon reviews, for instance, a large portion come from people who state that they haven’t read the book but have such antipathy to Geithner that they want to discourage everyone from buying it. Similarly, a sympathetic interview of Geithner by Andrew Ross Sorkin elicited overwhelmingly negative (and often extremely articulate and detailed) comments from New York Times readers.