Stewart said he had read at least ten insider accounts of
the economic maelstrom and had no idea that they could be "witty and
entertaining.'' Had he known, he said, he would have skipped the other nine.
The occasion was the release of Barofsky's book in paperback, and based on
Stewart's endorsement and the lively interview that followed, it soared to the
top of Amazon's bestseller list for the print and e-book versions. Impressed
with Stewart's enthusiasm, I downloaded the book and, after spending a snowy
afternoon with it, I can understand why he found it so engaging. The impact
turns out to be less about the dynamics of economic policy in a period with
events still unfolding than what Barofsky describes as the "paranoid weirdness"
of Washington. When it was initially published in the summer of 2012, Bailout
spent three weeks on the New York
Times bestseller list. It sparked a controversy among reviewers
divided between those who admired his vivid portrait of Washington's culture of
egotistic narcissism and critics who argued he was churlishly populist in his
judgments and especially unfair to Geithner and the Obama administration in
casting them as virtual captives of the big banks. The banks were the main
beneficiaries of the bailout, argued Barofsky, rather than the besieged
homeowners who had been an original objective of the program.
Barofsky came to Washington after almost eight years as an assistant
U.S. attorney in New York's Southern District, specializing in fraud cases and
pursuing the Colombian cocaine cartel. Although a lifelong Democrat, Barofsky
was appointed by President George W. Bush in November 2008, after Congress
approved TARP and as the national economy veered toward collapse. Barofsky was
chosen on the recommendation of Mike Garcia, the U.S. attorney for New York,
who seemed more interested in Barofsky's expertise than his politics. The irony
of Bailout is that Barofsky is much tougher on Geithner and his team
than on the outgoing Bush administration. As Matt Taibbi wrote on his Rolling
Stone political blog to mark the release of the paperback, "Bailout
is a kind of Alice in Wonderland tale of an ordinary sane person
disappearing down into a realm of hallucinatory dysfunction with Tim Geithner
playing the role of the Mad Hatter and Barofsky the increasingly frustrated
Alice who realizes he's stuck at the stupidest tea party he ever was at."
Geithner's endurance as Treasury secretary as the economy
has gradually begun to recover has earned him credit among those in the worlds
of finance and journalism who contend that the worst of the looming catastrophe
of 2008-09 never happened. In a disparaging review of Bailout, Jackie
Calmes, a New York Times Washington correspondent, observed: "As ugly
and flawed as the rescue process was, and as galling as Wall Street's revived
bravado and bonuses can be to most Americans, the fact remains that an economic
collapse was averted ... Yet (Barofsky's) book is a chronicle of complaints
that Treasury undercut, blindsided and ignored him."