Tim Geithner: My Family Compared Me to a Military Hero Fighting Overseas

A Memoir From the Eye of a Financial Storm (The New York Times)

One afternoon in the summer of 2008, as the financial system was careening toward the abyss that would send the United States into the worst economic emergency  since the Great Depression, Timothy F. Geithner — then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and later, President Obama’s Treasury secretary — tried to lighten the mood in his office with “an impromptu contest for the best metaphor for what was happening.”

Among the phrases suggested that day were: the wheels are “coming off the bus,” the engines are “falling off the plane” and “the rivets are coming off the submarine.” There were comparisons to wildfires and earthquakes, “cancer and contagion, sweaters unraveling and boulders rolling down a hill.” (And this was before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September accelerated fears into an extreme panic.)