charlie: timothy geithner sat at this table and others, and ben bernanke, and they said that the thingt stunned them the most was how fragile the financial system was. gillian: as i say, there's a reason why the roots of the theit market comes from meaning to believe. you have to trust. up and realized they couldn't value anything, everyone is today, just like 2006, everyone had investment portfolios indirectly dependent on subprime mortgage. almost everybody has some element of a chinese exposed asset in their portfolio. we live in a very connected world where contagion can spread quickly. it is very opaque still. the other issue which i keep coming back to is the bottom markets. we had bonds now i extraordinarily -- at extraordinarily high prices and interest rates at low prices. everyone is saying i'm so confident that the economy will the governmentd will pay back my money, and i will lend the government money and get almost no return back over 5, 10, 20 years. that requires a leap of blind faith because bond prices are so low so people are taking. charlie: when equity markets are

gillian: charlie: most people believe timothy geithner, saved the american system.you believe that? gillian: i think they did a pretty remarkable job after the event started. it took a long time to act. if they had acted more decisively earlier they could , have staved off a lot of the crisis and damage. but they did come in in the end, and by early 2009, after the lehman brothers collapsed, the agi fiasco, they were stepping in. they were supporting financial markets. charlie: even some who didn't want to, like j.p. morgan. gillian: exactly. they were forcing write-downs. today from the vantage point of europe, if europe had done that at the same time as americans, the european banking system would be much healthier. it is not, because they delayed even more than the americans. another big lesson is you have to act decisively quickly and early to make the crisis better. charlie: that is the lesson of the u.s. and japan. gillian: japan took a long time before they realized it. they delayed a decade. charlie: where are we today? gillian: we have a financial system th

liz: jack lew, timothy geithner wrote pretty much the same letter and made the same statements over thethere such thing as -- >> they got the same result. it was not a shutdown, look, you mentioned a couple of times when the debt ceiling increase was delayed slightly. remember when ted cruz stopped it from happening because he thought he could somehow by doing that get congress to kill obamacare. that didn't happen. look, it's going to happen, and i would -- and it is so less important than what is happening in the economy, for almost all americans, i don't think too many people outside the beltway are sitting around worried about the debt limit. i live inside the beltway and i'm not worried about it. >> if i may, i represented northeastern ohio for a decade prior to term limits in the ohio senate. and we have an airbase in my former senate district, in my home county of trumbull county, when the government does shut down it has implications outside of federal workers, those that work for the social security administration, the military, and that means they're going to go without pay, g

brought in a whole bunch of people from citigroup to run his transition team, and people like timothy geithner and eric holder were -- and lanny brewer, the assistant attorney general throughout that time, they were corporate lawyers who had long worked for wall street. they had all the banks had been their clients, and that came through in a lot of their enforcement decisions. so just in terms of that, i had always been critical of obama, but part of the reflection, looking back issue think history will look back on him in a very favorable way. not necessarily because of his policy ideas. because of the progressive perfect -- he was a disappointment to a lot of people in a lot of areas, whether it's the continuation of guantanamo bay or the drone bombings or whatever it was, but his demeanor, his compose sure and his unwillingness to give in to anger and to not give up on whole segments of the society, i was really impressed by what he said after the election by way of, i think, criticizing hillary clinton. one thing he said was, even in places where i knew i was going to lose i continued to