How to make sure we never, ever, ever bail out Wall Street again

It's easy: Let the banks fail and give the money to American taxpayers instead

Yellen
(Image credit: (Alex Wong/Getty Images))

Are you still angry that Washington forced Main Street to bail out Wall Street during the Great Recession? Timothy Geithner can live with that.

In his new book, Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, the former Obama Treasury secretary insists government needed to stop the panic by whatever means necessary. During a five-alarm inferno, the thinking goes, it's smarter to focus on extinguishing the blaze than punishing the arsonists. And to Geithner, dissenters are misguided purveyors of "Old Testament vengeance" and "moral hazard fundamentalists."

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James Pethokoukis

James Pethokoukis is the DeWitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he runs the AEIdeas blog. He has also written for The New York Times, National Review, Commentary, The Weekly Standard, and other places.