Geithner Defends Proposed Overhaul of Financial System

June 18, 2009— -- Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner today launched the Obama administration's push for the most sweeping financial system overhaul since the Great Depression, beginning with a Capitol Hill hearing.

But during a morning session with the Senate Banking Committee, lawmakers made it clear the administration would encounter opposition from both sides of the aisle.

"Over the past two years, our nation has faced the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression," he said this morning before the Senate Banking Committee. "Our financial system failed to perform its critical functions.

"American families are making essential changes in response to this crisis. It's our responsibility to do the same, to make our government work better."

With widespread criticism emanating from Capitol Hill and the financial industry, including key groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the administration faces a fight to get its proposals passed into law.

Geithner today urged lawmakers to come together and take action while the effects of the current financial crisis are still being felt across the country.

"Every financial crisis over the last generation has sparked some effort at reform, but past efforts have begun too late, often after the will to act has subsided. We cannot let this happen this time," Geithner warned. "We may disagree about the details, and we will have to work through these issues, but ordinary Americans have suffered too much, trust in our financial system has been too shaken, and our economy was brought to close to the brink for us to let this moment pass."

Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., told his colleagues that this issue may be "the most important thing" they have done in the last 60 or 70 years or will ever do "for years to come."

"Getting this right, I don't sense on this committee any great ideological divides," he noted. "What I do sense is a determination to figure out what works best, to get it right, and to get the job done."

The Connecticut lawmaker came out with an angry response to critics of the proposed consumer protection agency.

"When I pick up the morning newspaper and I read the first headline here that 'fault lines emerge as industry groups blast plan to create consumer agency' -- what planet are you living on?" he railed. "The very people who created the damn mess are the ones now arguing that consumers ought not to be protected! They're the people who paid this price! And the idea that you're going to, first of all, attack the very clients and customer who depend upon you every day is not the place to begin."