Sheila Bair, former chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, talks to “Viewpoint” host Eliot Spitzer about why the financial collapse happened and whether the government should have done more. Bair has written a new book about her experiences during the financial crisis, “Bull by the Horns.”
The former FDIC head criticizes the way the bailout was handled by the Treasury Department. “A lot of this was being driven by covering up for Citigroup’s problems.” Bair goes on to say that the Treasury Department didn’t implement harsher restrictions when it came to the bailout — such as forcing banks to allow the government to restructure mortgages en masse — because “they were afraid that if they put too many conditions or restrictions, the healthy banks wouldn’t take [the bailout]. And they wanted to make it look like everybody was the same. … They wanted everybody to take it so Citi didn’t look like an outlier.”
