Timothy Geithner

Geithner was born in Manhattan, New York City, to Peter Franz Geithner and Deborah Moore. His father, a German American, was the director of the Ford Foundation's Asia program in New York during the 1990s, after working for the United States Agency for International Development in Zambia and Zimbabwe. During the early 1980s, Geithner's father oversaw the Ford Foundation's microfinance programs in Indonesia being developed by Ann Dunham Soetoro, Barack Obama's mother, and they met at least once in Jakarta. Geithner's paternal grandfather, Paul Herman Geithner (1902–1972), immigrated with his parents to the United States in 1908 from Zeulenroda, Germany.

Geithner's mother, a Mayflower descendant, belongs to a New England family. Her father, Charles Frederick Moore, Jr., served as vice-president of public relations for the Ford Motor Company from 1952 to 1964, and advised President Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as Nelson Rockefeller and George W. Romney, on their respective presidential campaigns. His uncle, Jonathan Moore, served in the departments of Defense, Justice and State, as well as in the United Nations.

Geithner spent most of his childhood living abroad, including in Zimbabwe; Zambia; India; and Thailand, where he completed high school at the International School Bangkok. He studied Mandarin at Peking University in 1981, and at Beijing Normal University in 1982. Like his father, paternal grandfather and uncle; Geithner attended Dartmouth College, graduating in 1983, with an A.B. in Government and Asian studies, then earned a M.A. in international economics and East Asian studies from Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, in 1985. He has also studied Japanese.

Early career

Geithner worked for Kissinger Associates in Washington, D.C., from 1985 to 1988, when he joined the International Affairs division of the U.S. Treasury Department. He served as an attaché at the Embassy of the United States in Tokyo, then as deputy assistant secretary for international monetary and financial policy (1995–1996), senior deputy assistant secretary for international affairs (1996–1997), and assistant secretary for international affairs (1997–1998). He was Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs (1998–2001) under Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, who are widely considered to have been his mentors. While at the Treasury Department, he helped manage financial crises in Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand.

In 2001, Geithner left the Treasury to join the Council on Foreign Relations as a Senior Fellow in the International Economics department. He was director of the Policy Development and Review Department at the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003.

Post-Treasury career

Geithner left the Obama administration on January 25, 2013, and joined the Council on Foreign Relations as a Distinguished Fellow. He lectures at the Yale School of Management, and is co-chair of the board of directors of the International Rescue Committee.

In March 2014, he became the president and managing director of Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm. In February 2016, it was announced that JPMorgan Chase would provide a line of credit to help Warburg Pincus executives invest in a new multibillion-dollar fund at the firm. In July 2023, he became chairman of Warburg Pincus.

His memoir of his time as Secretary of the Treasury, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, was published in May 2014. Later that year, on October 7, 2014, Geithner testified in Starr v. United States, a lawsuit alleging that the government cheated American International Group shareholders of $40 billion by demanding a 79.9% stake in the company.

In April 2016, he was one of eight former Treasury secretaries who called on the United Kingdom to remain a member of the European Union ahead of the June 2016 membership referendum.

In July 2018, The Washington Post revealed that Mariner Finance, a company owned by the private equity firm of which Geithner is President, engaged in predatory lending behavior; capturing the sentiments of many former employees of Mariner Finance interviewed by The Post, a former manager trainee at a Mariner Finance branch in Nashville characterized the company's business model as "a way of monetizing poor people".

In the Handbook of Financial Stress Testing published in 2022, Geithner reflected back on financial stress testing and suggested ways forward.

Making Home Affordable

In his book Bailout: How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street, Neil Barofsky argues that Geithner never had the intention to utilize the Home Affordable Modification Program as intended by Congress. Instead of providing relief for homeowners to avoid foreclosures, it was Geithner's plan that the bank should proceed with these foreclosures. Geithner said that he "estimates" that the banks "can handle ten million foreclosures, over time", and that HAMP "will help foam the runway for them" by “keeping the full flush of foreclosures from hitting the financial system all at the same time". As such, "banks participating in the program have rejected four million borrowers’ requests for help, or 72 percent of their applications, since the process began". Citimortgage and JPMorgan Chase were among the banks that refused the most HAMP claims. As such, the program only helped 887,001 people out of the over 4 Million people that were originally estimated to be able to benefit from the program.

Geithner married Carole Marie Sonnenfeld, his classmate at Dartmouth, on June 8, 1985, at his parents' summer home in Orleans, Massachusetts. She is a licensed clinical social worker and an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at George Washington University School of Medicine, where she teaches listening skills to medical students. She is the author of a coming-of-age children's novel about grief. Her father, Albert Sonnenfeld, was a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Princeton University and a food critic; her mother, Portia, died when Carole was 25, shortly after she was married.

Criticism

Geithner weathered criticism early in the Obama presidency, when Congressman Connie Mack (R-FL) suggested he should resign over the AIG bonus scandal, and Alabama Senator Richard Shelby said that Geithner was "out of the loop". Democrats largely joined Obama in supporting Geithner, and there was no serious talk of his losing his job from within the administration.

In November 2009, Oregon Representative Peter DeFazio, speaking for himself and some fellow members of the Progressive Caucus, suggested that both Geithner and Lawrence Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, should be fired in order to curtail unemployment and signal a new direction for the Obama administration's fiscal policy. When Geithner appeared in front of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee that month, the ranking House Republican, Kevin Brady of Texas, said to the secretary, "Conservatives agree that, as point person, you've failed. Liberals are growing in that consensus as well. Poll after poll shows the public has lost confidence in this president's ability to handle the economy. For the sake of our jobs, will you step down from your post?" Geithner defended his record, suggesting Brady was misrepresenting the situation and overestimating popular disapproval of his job performance.

In June 2011, The New Republic criticized Geithner from the left, arguing that he was and is overly concerned with the deficit at a time when, following the Great Recession, the government should be pursuing stimulus; and as a result, it is possible that the stimulus was smaller than it could have been.