Too Big to Fail [36]
Standing at the airport, Geithner certainly felt deflated, but for now it was mostly because his driver hadn’t appeared. “You want to just take a taxi?” Mitchell asked.
Geithner, arguably the second most powerful central banker in the nation after Bernanke, stepped into the twenty-person-deep taxi line.
Patting his pockets, he looked sheepishly at Mitchell. “Do you have cash on you?”
If Tim Geithner’s life had taken just a slightly different turn only months earlier, he might well have been CEO of Citigroup, rather than its regulator.
On November 6, 2007, as the credit crisis was first beginning to hit, Sanford “Sandy” Weill, the architect of the Citigroup empire and one of its biggest individual shareholders, scheduled a 3:30 p.m. call with Geithner. Two days earlier, after announcing a record loss, Citi’s CEO, Charles O. Prince III, had been forced to resign. Weill, an old-school glad-hander who had famously recognized and cultivated the raw talent of a young Jamie Dimon, wanted to talk to Geithner about bringing him on board: “What would you think of running Citi?” Weill asked.
Geithner, four years into his tenure at the New York Federal Reserve, was intrigued but immediately sensitive to the appearance of a conflict of interest. “I’m not the right choice,” he said almost reflexively.
For the following week, however, the prospect was practically all he could think about—the job, the money, the responsibilities. He talked it over with his wife, Carole, and pondered the offer as he walked their dog, Adobe, around Larchmont, a wealthy suburb about an hour from New York City. They already lived a comfortable life—he was making $398,200 a year, an enormous sum for a regulator—but compared with their neighbors along Maple Hill Drive, they were decidedly middle-of-the-pack. His tastes weren’t that expensive, save for his monthly $80 haircut at Gjoko Spa & Salon, but with college coming up for his daughter, Elise, a junior in high school, and his son, Benjamin, an eighth-grader behind her, he could certainly use the money.
He finally placed a call to his old pal Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary and Citigroup’s lead director, to make sure he hadn’t made a mistake. Rubin, a longtime Geithner mentor, politely told him that he was backing Vikram Pandit for the position, and encouraged him to stay in his current job. But the fact that he had been considered for a post of this magnitude was an important measure of Geithner’s newly earned prominence in the financial-world firmament and a reflection of the trust he had earned within it.
For much of his time at the Fed, he had detected a certain lack of respect from Wall Street. Part of the problem was that he was not out of the central banker mold with which financial types traditionally felt comfortable. In the ninety-five-year history of the Federal Reserve, eight men had served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York—and every one of them had worked on Wall Street as either a banker, a lawyer, or an economist. Geithner, in contrast, had been a career Treasury technocrat, a protégé of former secretaries Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin. His authority was also somewhat compromised by the fact that, at forty-six, he still looked like a teenager and was known to enjoy an occasional day of snowboarding—and that he was given to punctuating his sentences with “fuck.”
Some Washington officials, journalists, and even a few bankers were charmed by Geithner, whose wiry intensity and dry, self-deprecating wit helped create the image of him as something of a policy-making savant: Although he often appeared distracted and inattentive during meetings, he would, after everyone had said his piece, give a penetrating analysis of the entire discussion, in coherent, flowing paragraphs.
Others, however, regarded these performances as what they saw as a form of controlling shtick. Every month the New York Fed would host a lunch for Wall Street chieftains, the very people his office oversaw, and every month Geithner would slouch