Looking forward, Mr. Geithner has no plans. A regulator of Wall Street but not a creature of it, he will probably be the least likely former Treasury secretary to land there. “I’m going to take a long time,” he said in the second of two exit interviews, one conducted in the midst of the recent fiscal fight and one just after the news conference on Thursday at which President Obama formally nominated his successor, Jacob J. Lew.

Looking back, he is remarkably sanguine. He does not feel he would have made any decisions differently: the policy choices available to him were far from ideal, he said, but his team did the best it could within the realm of the politically possible. “It was a very bad crisis. No playbook. No road map. No clear precedent,” he said. “If we had a different set of constraints, particularly in fiscal policy, then I think that the economic outcome could have been modestly better.”

A sense of the weight of those constraints emerged in the brief speech Mr. Geithner gave at the White House news conference on Thursday, as Mr. Obama thanked him for his service. While describing the “compelling and rewarding work” of government, he mentioned the “divisive state of our political system.”

In the interviews, Mr. Geithner, 51, returned to the idea that the Treasury and the Obama administration might have done more if they had been given more latitude by Congress.

“The way our country is structured, by design, the founders left the Congress with all the meaningful authorities to determine the path of the economy and what you could do in a crisis,” he said, mentioning how hard the White House had pushed for more authority. “The scale of the fiscal response in particular was dependent” on what Congress would allow.

Mr. Geithner ran the Treasury during the tumultuous years of the financial crisis and a recession that slowly gave way to a recovery, albeit an unsteady one. As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before he joined Mr. Obama’s cabinet in 2009, he was at the center of the most nerve-racking moments of the banking crisis. And his low-key but forceful insistence kept the Treasury at the center of every major economic policy decision of Mr. Obama’s first term, aside from the health care overhaul.

By a combination of historical accident and his own design, Mr. Geithner will go down as one of the most influential Treasury secretaries, alongside figures like Robert E. Rubin, who served under President Bill Clinton, and Henry Morgenthau Jr., who served under Roosevelt.

But he has not always been a popular one. Both Republicans and Democrats have accused him of subverting capitalism and dedicating taxpayer money to “too big to fail” institutions in perpetuity. The left has criticized him for helping “fat cat” bankers instead of regular people, especially underwater homeowners.

“Is the system safer today?” said Dennis M. Kelleher, president of Better Markets, a nonprofit that advocates stricter financial regulations. “The collapse turned an implicit public guarantee into an explicit public guarantee. It is one of the most dramatic changes of federal policy in history and puts too much at stake.”

Still, Mr. Geithner has attained something like a first-among-equals stature at the White House. He is one of the only top-level staff members to have remained throughout Mr. Obama’s first term, and his word and policy judgments have prevailed in fight after fight and negotiation after negotiation.

“He went from someone who people were unsure of in the first six months to achieving the elevated status of being the guy who made the toughest and loneliest calls at the most politically perilous moments — and turned out to be right,” said Gene B. Sperling, director of the National Economic Council.

In many ways, his colleagues said, Mr. Geithner’s job seemed at times to be that of a firefighter or, at its worst moments, a glorified janitor. His four years were filled with a series of crises: the collapse of the financial system, spiraling unemployment, the cratering housing market, the financial reform bill, the ailing auto industry, the European debt crisis, a debt ceiling standoff and two protracted budget negotiations.

“He is so serene in good times and in bad,” said Michael Froman, a deputy national security adviser who has known Mr. Geithner for two decades and helped introduce him to Mr. Obama. Given Mr. Geithner’s background fighting financial disasters abroad as a Treasury aide, Mr. Froman said, “I think he was better prepared than anyone to deal with these crises.”

The decisions Mr. Geithner made during the financial crisis remain among his most controversial. For instance, he quashed proposals to seize bonuses, impose new taxes or otherwise punish bankers, whose pay rebounded quickly after the collapse.

Mr. Geithner refers to such proposals as the “Old Testament” part of the rescue and reform effort. “We just didn’t see a more effective response,” he said. “If you’re governing, your responsibility is to do what you think is going to be best for the welfare of the country.” More punitive measures might have been emotionally satisfying, administration aides said, but they might also have put taxpayer dollars at risk by destabilizing the banks.

Housing is another area in which Mr. Geithner’s leadership has been criticized. The Obama administration estimated at first that it could reach three million to four million homeowners with its mortgage plans, but it has aided less than half that number and left billions of dollars unspent.

“Our authority on housing was very, very limited,” Mr. Geithner said. “We were able to use a significant amount of the authority in the Troubled Asset Relief Program to design a program for modifying the loans of a pretty substantial fraction of Americans facing foreclosure. But we had no legal authority to compel banks to provide mortgage relief. All we could do was find incentives.”

He added, “It’s not clear with greater authority we would have been able to achieve a significantly faster pace of improvement.”

Such technocratic responses are typical of Mr. Geithner. His aides say that empathizing with the public and communicating his anger or disappointment with the slow pace of the recovery have always been among his weak points.

He has struggled at times with the outward-facing role of the Treasury secretary. He dislikes speaking with the press and bristles at being a “potted plant” trotted out at news conferences, for instance. Aides said they prepared him for media appearances as if playing the game Taboo, banning him from using phrases like “credit-default spreads.”

But within the White House, Mr. Geithner’s technocratic skills and no-drama attitude, as well as his calls on how to deal with the crisis, made him one of Mr. Obama’s most trusted aides. Though he is mostly known for his work on the financial crisis, he was also the White House’s main emissary to Europe on its debt crisis and spent hundreds of hours working on fiscal negotiations with Congress. During his tenure, he made 61 domestic trips and 37 international ones, and testified 67 times to Congressional committees.

Looking back, he said, more authority or financing from Congress might have helped the administration promote the recovery. But he said he felt comfortable otherwise.

Asked directly how he viewed his tenure, however, Mr. Geithner shied away. “I kind of think that’s better for history to answer,” he said.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/business/geithners-treasury-tenure-defined-by-financial-crisis.html?partner=rss&emc=rss