"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"
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A trained crisis manager’s two-step: accept blame, then widen the frame until “blame” dissolves into weather. Geithner’s sentence is engineered for an audience angry about a catastrophe that clearly has an address (Wall Street) but also a contagion map (everywhere). By conceding that the crisis “in some ways started in the United States” and that “we bear a substantial share,” he performs accountability without surrendering the steering wheel. It’s a rhetorical down payment meant to buy legitimacy for the harder ask that follows: don’t treat this as a uniquely American moral failure with uniquely American fixes.
The subtext lives in the contrast between agency and atmosphere. “We bear responsibility” implies actors, decisions, oversight failures. “Global forces that built up” shifts causality toward abstractions - capital flows, savings gluts, deregulation across borders, the hunt for yield - forces that sound inevitable, even impersonal. That move matters politically. If the crisis is a domestic sin, the remedy is punishment: prosecutions, breakups, a nationalist backlash. If it’s a global system shock, the remedy becomes coordination: central bank swaps, multinational bailouts, technocratic triage.
Context makes the calibration legible. Speaking as a senior U.S. economic official in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, Geithner is defending aggressive stabilization while preempting simplistic narratives. The line “so difficult to contain” is the quiet brief for extraordinary interventions: we didn’t merely choose to act; we were trapped inside an interconnected machine. It’s not exculpation exactly - it’s a bid to turn outrage into permission for pragmatic, globally minded governance.
The subtext lives in the contrast between agency and atmosphere. “We bear responsibility” implies actors, decisions, oversight failures. “Global forces that built up” shifts causality toward abstractions - capital flows, savings gluts, deregulation across borders, the hunt for yield - forces that sound inevitable, even impersonal. That move matters politically. If the crisis is a domestic sin, the remedy is punishment: prosecutions, breakups, a nationalist backlash. If it’s a global system shock, the remedy becomes coordination: central bank swaps, multinational bailouts, technocratic triage.
Context makes the calibration legible. Speaking as a senior U.S. economic official in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, Geithner is defending aggressive stabilization while preempting simplistic narratives. The line “so difficult to contain” is the quiet brief for extraordinary interventions: we didn’t merely choose to act; we were trapped inside an interconnected machine. It’s not exculpation exactly - it’s a bid to turn outrage into permission for pragmatic, globally minded governance.
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| Topic | Money |
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