J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressTreasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner.One way to make politically unpopular acts popular is to recognize their unpopularity – and hope that the public comes to respect you for going ahead with them anyway.
That may have been the reasoning behind some intriguing remarks Thursday evening from Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner on the subject of financial rescues. After a speech focused on the economy at the Economic Club of New York, one of his moderators reminded him of his comment to The New Yorker in 2010 when he said: “We saved the economy but we kind of lost the public doing it.”
On Thursday, he was asked whether the public could in fact be won back. Mr. Geithner still didn’t sound hopeful.
He reiterated his view that, around the time of the financial crisis, the public probably would not have supported the bailouts for banks that helped cause the crisis. But Mr. Geithner added that past financial crises had been made worse by governments that failed to act with appropriate force because they were afraid of doing something that was unpopular.
“They sit there and stare at the deep political cost,” Mr. Geithner said. “That’s what caused crises to be worse than they needed to be.”
He also suggested that political wariness could be what’s holding Europe today back from making bigger moves to fight its problems. Mr. Geithner said the Continent’s policy makers had taken “a more tentative and slow approach.”
The taxpayer money that went toward the rescue of banks has not seemed to have become a big issue for voters in this year’s presidential race. But if it becomes one, we may be hearing the administration’s defense: you didn’t like the bailouts, but we did them anyway, and you should be thankful we did.