Timothy Geithner Quotes

This crisis is not simply a more severe version of the usual business cycle recession, the typical downturn in which economies ultimately adjust and stabilize.

We judged that a sudden, disorderly failure of Bear would have brought with it unpredictable but severe consequences for the functioning of the broader financial system and the broader economy, with lower equity prices, further downward pressure on home values, and less access to credit for companies and households.

The government can help, but we need to make this transition now to a recovery led by private investment, private.

It is very important for people to understand that the United States of America and no country around the world can devalue its way to prosperity, to be competitive. It is not a viable, feasible strategy, and we will not engage in it.

This crisis exposed very significant problems in the financial systems of the United States and some other major economies. Innovation got too far out in front of the knowledge of risk.

Monetary policy itself cannot sensibly be directed at reducing imbalances.

Although this crisis in some ways started in the United States, it is a global crisis. We bear a substantial share of the responsibility for what has happened, but factors that made the crisis so acute and so difficult to contain lie in a broader set of global forces that built up in the years before the start of our current troubles.

The plausible outcomes range from the gradual and benign to the more precipitous and damaging.

There is a basic lesson on financial crises that governments tend to wait too long, underestimate the risks, want to do too little. And it ultimately gets away from them, and they end up spending more money, causing much more damage to the economy.

I think we're not going to preserve Fannie and Freddie in anything like their current form. We're going to have to bring fundamental change to that market.

Looking past the immediate crisis, a more resilient system must be built on stronger and better designed shock absorbers, both in the major institutions and in the infrastructure of the financial system.

Hyperinflation is not going to happen in this country, will never happen ... The Fed putting so much money into the system is not going to create the risk of hyperinflation in the future. We have a strong independent Federal Reserve with a very strong mandate from the Congress, and they will do what's necessary to keep inflation low and stable over time.

The substantial uncertainty about the path of asset price movements going forward necessarily reduces the case for altering policy in advance of the move.

As financial markets continue to broaden and deepen, the behavior of asset prices will play an important role in the formulation of monetary policy going forward, perhaps a more important role than in the past.

We believe in a strong dollar ... Chinese financial assets are very safe.

The rest of the world needs the US economy and financial system to recover in order for it to revive. We remain at the center of global economic activity with financial and trade ties to every region of the globe.

The choice is between which mistake is easier to correct: underdoing it or overdoing it.