Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner

ONE
An American Abroad

I had an extraordinary childhood, but I was an ordinary kid.
I was a good student, never a great student. I was a decent
athlete, nothing special. I wasn’t particularly ambitious or
hardworking. By the time I went to college, I had lived in Africa,
India, and Thailand, through wars and coups, but I had little
interest in politics, economics, or even current events. I had all
kinds of amazing experiences—trips to Kashmir and Kenya, Beirut
and Bali—but I rarely stopped to think about them.
My exotic upbringing didn’t feel exotic at the time. It felt like
life. Mostly, it felt like fun. I was lucky to grow up in a big, close,
raucous family, with a lot of love and laughter, without a lot of
drama. My sister, Sarah, is two years younger; my twin brothers,
Jonathan and David, are four years younger. We were too busy
playing and exploring to do much reflecting. My early memories
are pleasant memories: trekking in Nepal, driving a small Boston
Whaler off Cape Cod, dumping colored powder on my siblings
during the Indian holiday of Holi. We weren’t rich by American
standards, but we were very privileged.

As unremarkable as my childhood seemed to me at the time, it
exposed me to the world, to extreme poverty and vicious
inequality, to diverse customs and cultures. My parents, Peter
Franz Geithner and Deborah Moore Geithner, gave me this
amazing gift of a global education. Even more important, they
gave me a constant, generous, unconditional love. They taught
me—by example, not by lecture—how to take life seriously
without taking myself too seriously. They showed me how

helping others can give work meaning. They modeled humility.
They never pressured me to do this or do that, other than to be
kind and curious, but they always seemed to have confidence in me,

and that created  confidence  within me.

My mother is a musician, a teacher, a bleeding-heart liberal
bursting with empathy and optimism. She says she has “up
genes”; she got a tattoo of a horseshoe crab to keep her breast
cancer scars company. She studied Hindi, Thai, and Chinese while
living abroad. She’s an enthusiast who shares her enthusiasm
with everyone she meets, who makes lifelong friends everywhere
she travels. My father is quieter, more reserved, more skeptical,
more conservative in every way. He’s an understated child of the

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner