Geithner Q&A

You were in China recently. How worried are the Chinese about their debt in America?

I think they recognize that their economic fate is very closely tied with the fate of the United States, and that's a healthy recognition.

Here's a direct question about bankers. Do they care about anything other than their own compensation?|

That is a very interesting question. I'm not going to answer that question ... I think that it is hard to judge ... It is hard to judge motive in these things. But, you know, we want there to be risk-taking in our economy. There's a risk that given what we've been through, we're going to have a long period of people taking too little risk, not too much.

What do you want the banking system to look like five years from now? The government has talked about how we want to have more, smaller players. But it seems as if we will end up with a few big elephants.

We want a little less drama. One of the great strengths of our system is that we have 8,000 to 9,000 banks, and we have not just these large institutions but a very diverse mix of regional and local community banks across the country, and that made our system in this crisis more resilient. I don't think that we want to end up with a more concentrated system than we have today.

Would you say there is a silver lining in the sense that American consumers have to hunker down and get back to some older values?

I think people are going to be more focused on what they do rather than what they earn. And I think that's a healthy thing.