treasury secretary tim geithner at some interesting comments.l if he needed to talk to the european union. >> tim geithner essentially wrote a love sonnet to the finance minister here. he was in berlin giving a speech and he says it was him who you always call. he was the one that answered when you needed to talk to someone about europe. you get a sense of how things were and how tense they were after mario draghi said he would do whatever it takes to save the euro. there is a conversation that geithner said he had. it will be interesting to see how this relationship, if it continues now that tim geithner is now in the private sector, may be looking for deals and distressed assets across the globe. >> i really love this story. is it just as basic as germany has power in europe and that is the guy i want to speak to? >> he is a noted economist. there was a clear recognition that if you needed to get europe to do something, you needed to bring the germans along and then worry about someone else. tight no recognizes him as an intensely smart man an

in 2009, then secretary tim geithner said he wanted aig just successful enough so the taxpayer can get. benmosche had different plans. he was going to revive the company and pay the taxpayer back. did you ever think you might not? >> no, i did not think i could not get it done. when i looked at everything, i could see that i could pay it back, and then what i said was, in september of 2009, i think what you are going to be left with is a $70 billion company. if you have $70 billion as your margin of error, there is no doubt. >> that was your back of the envelope. >> that was my back of the envelope calculation. i was wrong. it is $100 billion. and our market cap is $80 billion. >> when aig finally paid back the american taxpayers in 2012 with nearly a $23 billion profit, the company took out ads thanking the american people. but benmosche felt the thank yous to him from government officials fell short. you had lunch with timothy geithner. was that the first time you had lunch with him? >> they met with me when they signed the deal that gave them 92% ownership of aig. the question was,

and tim geithner said, he hadn't gotten his story out, and you want to say, no, tim, it's not because you give bad speeches. it's because everybody is mortgages are still underwater six years later, and when you go back and trace this from the beginning, think there are set of choices that have been made that created the right-wing populism and that a lot of -- >> how -- >> the abandonment of the populism traditional to the party. >> i am tempted to believe that because i think we share similar politics. but when you look at clinton, he precipitated the huge backlash and had very different policies than barack obama. something seems baked into the cake. a liberal democratic president is going face right wing populace backlash because this country has a lot of conservatives who won't like a democratic president no matter what he does. >> there's truth in what you said and the backlash we're suffering right now is far deeper and far broader. the truth is it's even worse than it seems. it's the very legacy of liberalism that is at stake. bill clinton, the model centrist of his time, bill

tim geithner didn't lend a lot of courage and confidence in the markets. we as network started talking about that. no sooner did we talk about that, jeff immelt the head of ge owned cnbc at time called a meeting of senior people. mostly anchors. didn't call me, thank god. basically had a talk, a discussion about whether cnbc was being fair to the president. we should point out that ge got a lot of largess, received a lot of largess from the obama administration over the years. now did they tell you during this, did they tell the people during this meeting, go easy on obama? no. there is a chilling effect when your boss calls you in, says, not just your boss, the head of ge, everybody is significant around and you're saying, oh, are we being fair to the president by pointing out that his economic theories make no sense or whatever we were doing? and you know that is the mainstream media. you know people attack fox all the time and we give the other side all the time? >> even if you want to argue the gruber comments are not very important or you want to chal

can remember during the crisis, so many congressional hearings where one minute somebody thought tim geithner worked at goldman sachs. he's always been in the public sector, never worked at goldman sachs. less they worked in business, and so many have not. they have no clue how the federal reserve, hour currencies work, how central banks work. do we want them sticking their fingers into it? >> one area they ought to leave alone, the financial markets might get concerned. these guys have done such a wonderful job on fiscal policy, they want to run monetary policy on capitol hill? i think it's a very bad idea. i think within the fed, there's a lot of paranoia over congress becoming more intrusive. president would veto anything that got that far. if it's the spring of 2017, and we have president rubio in a republican congress and they want to curb the fed, the markets would not like that. liz: you would, i would guess, see major gyrations. our viewers think the world is resolving around our midterm elections. it is not. have you russia, the eurozone in trouble, a lot of these things matter? >> a

and tim geithner who was then the head of the new york fed which is a major regulatory agency involvedbank regulation. i don't know if testimony comes down to them. there was a lot of fireworks there. it comes down to these secondary people who have to opine, who had been opining before the judge about what they thought was the legality -- liz: well, we have one. professor luigi zen galless, he is being brought onto the witness stand or just as we speak to talk about -- a professor at university of chicago booth school of business. and he has written a book called "saving capitalism from the capitalists." i don't know what david boies, the plaintiff's attorney, hank greenberg's attorney, really wants from this professor, but perhaps it is to say that the government overreached. >> well, listen, clearly this was unprecedented. they never -- the federal government has never bailed out the financial system in this sense ever. they've clearly every never bailed out an insurance company, but the insurance company had this financial derivatives portion which became part of the financial busi

and former treasury secretary tim geithner testified for weeks on the witness stand.ust because of a jam-packed witness list, fox business learned that greenberg will most likely, as we said, be called to the stand on friday in what has become the most closely watched trial on the crisis. they say the 89-year-old greenberg will be on the stand possibly up to four hours. we need to tell you that neither greenberg's attorneys nor justice department had commented, although the justice department did reply to my e-mail saying they don't comment on strategy or when a certain witness would appear. boise has maintained, that's the attorney for greenberg, that the government did not have the right to seize equity or impose the owners interest rates up to 14% on aig. paulson, geithner, bernanke with have testified and time was of the essence to preserve market confidence and to demonstrate to the public that punitive terms were placed on institutions taking taxpayer money. the trial back in session tomorrow. fox business covering it every step of the way. we have the closing b

the former secretary tim geithner and former federal chairman ben bernanke testified in previous hearingsaig reports earnings after the market close today. >>> investors looking into the crash of virgin galactic two says the cause of the in-flight breakup is still unknown. the american national transportation safety board says all the important parts of the rocket which left a five-mile path of debris across the mohabi desert in california have now been found. the crash killed one test pilot identified and the second pilot survived parachuting to safety and is now in the hospital. >>> speaking of the mohabi space area, richard branson said his space flight company would learn from what went wrong and then move forward. >> i truly believe that humanity's greatest achievements come out of our greatest pain. this team is a group of the bravest, the brightest, the most determined and the most resilient of people. we are determined to honor the bravery of the pilots and the teams here by learning from this tragedy. only then can we move forward united behind a collective desire to push the bou

at one point tim geithner calls it a fog, a diagnostic fog. then the fed has no constraints on it. bug issue now. >> david boyce arguing that the possibility you get a surprise win on a $25 billion case against the government. is it actually on the cards? >> it's a big number. the legal standard for that is high. i don't think there is any doubt he established how capricious the fed was. >> i remember they didn't know what was happening at aig. it came to them late. they were trying to figure it out on the fly and they were clueless. >> they didn't know if it was solvent or not. yet they gave them the emergency loan. that's fine. we got through the crisis. they have consistently tried to say we acted on principle. that is clearly not holding water. i think this trial has done a lot to eliminate those chaotic days. >> good to see you. thank you very much, jim stewart from "the new york times." >>> when we come back, the ceo of hain celestial will join us live for an exclusive interview after the company beat estimates in its first quarter. how do you beat the number one seed? you ju