Pierre Bourdieu, Tim Geithner, and Cultural Capital



Tim Geithner may very well be such a man.

The New York Times ran a long article today about Geithner’s close connections to the New York financial elite during his years as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a curious public-private entity that plays a crucial role in the operation of the Federal Reserve, yet is governed by a board a majority of which is elected by the private sector banks themselves. The general thrust of the article is that Geithner had close relationships with many of the people whose banks it was his job to supervise, and that many of his proposals and policies have been generally friendly to those banks. But it should be noted that even after reviewing Geithner’s calendar for all of 2007 and 2008, with all its tantalizing mentions of posh meals and get-togethers (the Four Seasons is mentioned seven times), the Times did not find a smoking gun. Geithner was approached as a candidate to be CEO of Citigroup (an offer he quickly rejected), but nowhere is there any evidence that he traded favors for any kind of personal gain.

Instead, what the article portrays is a continuing series of close contacts – breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee, charity board meetings, etc. – with a set of very rich, very powerful, very impressive people who all believed in the importance of Wall Street, and the importance of lighter regulation of Wall Street, and the importance of making sure that Tim Geithner believed in it too. It’s doubtful that there was anything close to a countervailing influence from people who thought that Wall Street was taking excessive risks and needed to be reined in; the first meeting with Nouriel Roubini was on August 28, 2008. I don’t mean to imply that Geithner was an impressionable youngster when he arrived at the New York Fed. He was 42 (older than I am now), and he had grown up in the Treasury Department in the Clinton administration. But that was a Treasury Department headed by Robert Rubin (former head of Goldman Sachs, later head of the executive committee at Citigroup) and his disciple Larry Summers, both of whom were strong believers – at the time, at least – in the importance of Wall Street and free financial markets.

The Geithner presidency seems to have represented the high point of a long tradition of cozy relationships between the head of the New York Fed and the banks it supervised. The Times article points out that Geithner’s two predecessors ended up as executives at investment banks, and his successor came from Goldman Sachs. But under Geithner, the relationships may have been their coziest:



And at the same time, Geithner seems to have been an especially able advocate for Wall Street, both while at the New York Fed and as Secretary of the Treasury. The Times focuses on a few incidents where he took the banks’ side against other regulators, such as the debate over adopting Basel II, which essentially allowed banks to use their own risk models to determine how much capital they needed. And it should be undisputed that since taking over Treasury Geithner has taken positions that are generally friendly to the large banks (Public-Private Investment Program) or reflect a Wall Street-centered worldview that misreads public and political sentiment (AIG bonus fiasco). He has also continued to surround himself with people from Wall Street, including his chief of staff, the law firm that drafted the proposed legislation giving Treasury resolution authority for non-bank institutions, and the asset management firm handling Treasury’s troubled assets. None of this is new, of course; Treasury has been hiring people from Wall Street for years. And that’s precisely the point.

I don’t know Tim Geithner. But I have no reason to believe he is corrupt. Instead, the simplest explanation of the Times article is that he has internalized a worldview in which Wall Street is the central pillar of the American economy, the health of the economy depends on the health of a few major Wall Street banks, the importance of those banks justifies virtually any measures to protect them in their current form, large taxpayer subsidies to banks (and to bankers) are a necessary cost of those measures – and anyone who doesn’t understand these principles is a simple populist who just doesn’t understand the way the world really works.

Returning to my initial theme, he got the cultural education that rich people get, except instead of just going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, he was educated in the culture of Wall Street. Just like an education in art history is a marker of class distinction that is used to perpetuate class distinction, an education in modern finance is a marker of distinction that sets off those who understand the true importance of Wall Street for the American economy. As long the powerful people in Washington, including the regulators who oversee the financial industry, share that worldview, Wall Street’s power and ability to make money will be secure.

That is the importance of cultural capital.


5 Responses to "Pierre Bourdieu, Tim Geithner, and Cultural Capital"

  1. Frank Visconti   April 28, 2009 at 7:42 am

    Excellent evaluation.Extremely well written.Thank you.

  2. Magi Ritzmann   April 28, 2009 at 2:02 pm

    Excellent analysis. The moment Obama selected Summers and Geithner, my heart sunk. It was clear that his economic team was adhering to the culture of Wall Street. I think if we do not succeed in braking that close tie, the financial markets as well as the broader economy can not be made more stable. The next financial catastrophe can not be averted.

  3. uwe korak   April 28, 2009 at 7:08 pm

    A look at prevailing ideologies among the agents (Greenspan, Geithner, Rubin, Summers et.al.) remains to be an instructive category, if one wants to understand the current crisis, much more so than outright corruption, as you have pointed out correctly. While corrupt officials/politicians can be prosecuted in this country, ideologically corrupt officials/politicians cannot. Ideologically corrupt officials might not be re-elected, if found out. That of course would require an electorate that is not equally blinded by that same ideology (false consciousness). The state of the American media is not very confidence inspiring in this regard.Geithner in his role as Secretary of the Treasury is supposed to work for the people of this country, first, not for corporations. The absurdity of this ideological corruption can be illustrated with a look at the People’s Republic of China. There, the Communist Party insures the smooth operation of the capitalist machine by suppressing environmental concerns, unionization and democratic development.President Obama said on April 15,“A dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or ten dollar of loans to families and businesses.”We know the banks already have the dollar. It remains to be seen if and when that dollar will result in anything for the working Americans.Thank you for your insightful article.

    • Anonymous   April 30, 2009 at 10:11 am

      The media are the primary source of information from which the electorate internalize the ideologies that lead them to vote for political candidates and to support policies and issues that often contradict their own best interests.

  4. Michael Khor   April 29, 2009 at 9:35 am

    Is cultural capital anologous to croyism?