Opening, and interesting, paragraphs............

     On the morning of January 27, 2009, my first full day as secretary of the Treasury, I met with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office.  The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression was still raging, and he wanted to put out the fire for good.  The banking system was broken.  The broader economy was contracting at a Depression-level rate.  Consumer confidence had sunk to an all-time low, and millions more Americans were in danger of losing their jobs.  The President looked calm and reasonably comfortable after a week in the White House, despite all the bad news he was getting.
     I was about to give him some more.
     First, I thanked him for coming to my swearing-in the night before, a nice gesture of personal confidence in me.  We had met just three months earlier, and I was in many ways an unorthodox choice to lead Treasury.  I wasn't a banker, an economist, a politician, or even a Democrat.  I was a registered independent without much of a public profile - and the profile I had didn't exactly signal Obama-style hope and change.  As head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, I had spent the past year working with a Republican Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, and a Republican Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, Jr., to design a series of spectacularly unpopular rescues of financial firms.  I didn't look like a Treasury secretary, either.  I was forty-seven.  I lacked gray-haired gravitas.  Barney Frank, one of my closest allies in Congress, later observed that when I spoke in public, I looked like I was at my own bar mitzvah.
     And I was already politically damaged goods.  I had been portrayed throughout my confirmation hearings as a tax cheat, a tool of Wall Street, an enemy of Main Street.  Even though I had spent the previous two decades in public service, I was routinely described as a venal investment banker.  Some thought I might be the first Treasury nominee rejected since before the Civil War, and I had considered withdrawing before the vote.  I was eventually confirmed, by the narrowest margin since World War II;  I already felt crushing guilt about the humiliation I was forcing on my family, and the political capital the President had to spend on me.
-Timothy F. Geithner,  Stress Test:  Reflections on Financial Crises