Sheila Bair on TARP, Citigroup and Tim Geithner. Runs 1 minute.
"Tim Geithner and Vikram Pandit were in constant communication during the crisis, and they were figuring out what they were going to do and then trying to jam it on me."
Bair's new book is Bull By the Horns.
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Sheila with Eliot Spitzer:
"Covering up for Citigroup's problems drove much of the bailout."
Excellent interview.
Bair criticizes the way the bailout was handled by the Treasury Department. “A lot of this was being driven by covering up for Citigroup’s problems.” She goes on to say that the Treasury Department didn’t implement harsher restrictions when it came to the bailout — such as forcing banks to allow the government to restructure mortgages en masse — because “they were afraid that if they put too many conditions or restrictions, the healthy banks wouldn’t take [the bailout]. And they wanted to make it look like everybody was the same. … They wanted everybody to take it so Citi didn’t look like an outlier.”
More from Bair's book:
"Tim Geithner and Vikram Pandit were in constant communication during the crisis, and they were figuring out what they were going to do and then trying to jam it on me."