by thenewgreen

Geithner may have given hundreds of news conferences during his four years as Treasury secretary, but he remains an awkward public speaker, even if his audience consists of college students in hooded sweatshirts. On this morning, as was the case many times before, his responses generally coalesced around the plan that defined his tenure: the wildly unpopular authorization of $700 billion in taxpayer money, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, to bail out Wall Street’s biggest banks. “To oversimplify it, and I think this was Jon Stewart’s framing,” Geithner told the students, “why would you give a dollar to a bank when you can give it to an American? Why not give them a dollar to help them pay their mortgage?”