Via Mediaite,Jon Stewart makes Tiny Tim Geithner squirm through an extended interview about bailing out the banks. Don't watch if you have high blood pressure, though, because Stewart misses a couple of chances to challenge Geithner on the facts:
Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who has been making the rounds to promote his new book, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, joined Jon Stewart on The Daily Show last night for an even-more-extended-than-usual interview. Right from the start, Stewart went at Geithner hard to explain the “perception difference” on the bailouts.
“This is like an optical illusion,” Stewart said. “One person looks at it and you see a pretty girl. And then you flip it and the other person looks at it and sees America getting fucked.”
“There’s only one reality,” Geithner insisted, pointing to the “terrible financial panic” that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers. “The only option — the only moral, responsible, just thing to do in that context is to protect people from the risk of mass unemployment, which is what happens in financial panics unless governments step in and make sure they keep the lights on.”
When Stewart began describing the situation as a plane full of arsonists on fire and going down, Geithner stopped him. “Well, it wasn’t just the arsonists,” he said. “If it was just the arsonists, you could have let the plane crash, that didn’t matter. The problem is there was a bunch of innocent victims who were on the plane with them.” Namely, the American people.
You can watch the entire interview:
