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> Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI

Major traumas in history are relived in song and story, with each different point of view adding layers of complexity and understanding, until you can’t absorb any more. My friend Anne said she’s full up and never wants to read another book about the Civil War or World War II, but perhaps she’s just not that interested in military history.

As historical traumas go, the 2008-2009 global financial crisis is still fresh, and, especially for those of us interested in financial sectors, it is well worth examining from many different vantage points. No viewpoint could be more central than Tim Geithner’s. Geithner was the head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank when the crisis began and Secretary of the Treasury as the Obama Administration inherited the disaster. The span of his involvement allows his book, Stress Test, to cover the whole sequence from the initial red flags when Countrywide Financial and other actors in the subprime mortgage market went down in the summer of 2007 to the wrap-up with the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010. Simply as storytelling, Stress Test is a well-written, gripping narrative – a ringside seat at the crisis.

But because Geithner, perhaps more than any other single person, was the point man on the crisis, Stress Test is also about explaining how and why the Fed and later the Administration acted as it did. While Geithner clearly justifies the majority of the decisions taken, unlike many post-service memoirs, self-justification does not get in the way of the book’s ultimate purpose: to explore Geithner’s philosophy of financial crisis management, as advice to future generations.

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