Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner credits President Obama‘s leadership with helping the nation recover from the 2008 financial crisis, saying he had an “amazingly good experience” serving the Democrat.
“My overwhelming experience was, this is a man very good at making decisions — unpopular decisions — after looking at all the evidence, who was willing at that time to put policy ahead of politics in a way that was very important for the country,” Geithner said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“He was excellent when in crisis.”
Geithner, who stepped down as head of the Treasury Department in January after four years on the job, said Obama resisted the temptation of blaming the financial meltdown on others.
“It would have been very easy for him to sort of sit back and say I’ll let it burn itself out, it’s something I inherited, I’m not responsible for it,” he said. “That would’ve been devastating for the country.”
Geithner, who just published his memoir, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, said the Obama administration never pressured him to portray the economy in a falsely optimistic light.
The president was “very tough on the rest of us, very tough on all of us to make sure we examined all of the options,” he said. “I never felt I was in a position where they put us – put a political restraint over what we were doing, and definitely never try to make us more optimistic than we should have been.”
Geithner added the economy today is “really getting better” and “healing a lot of the scars left over from the crisis.”
“It was going to take some time to heal, but we’re a significantly stronger country today,” he said. “Americans are just beginning to feel a little bit more confident on the future. And I think that incipient confidence you see is justified, because we have a lot of strengths.”
Geithner’s praise for Obama contrasts with the recent memoir of former defense secretary Robert Gates, who criticized the president’s handling of the Afghanistan war.
