Charlie Rose Talks to Tim Geithner

If there had been greater emergency powers, would you have saved Lehman Brothers?

Let’s think of it this way: What’s the ideal? The world’s uncertain. You’re not sure who’s solvent. You certainly don’t want to step in and protect everybody. You have to do triage, trying to separate out who’s fundamentally strong enough to survive and who’s so central to the functioning of the economy that it would be devastating to let them fail. You have to draw a circle, a fire break around them, and make sure you can defend that. But there will be people outside that fire break. And that’s a necessary thing, even a desirable thing, however painful it is to say.