[SOT/](timothy geithner/secretary of treasury)"i think it tells us what we already know, what Americans understand, which is the crisis was much deeper. The damage to confidence, wealth, people's security was much greater than people could see in the numbers at the time. Remember the economy was shrinking at an annual rate of 9% in the fourth quarter of '08. Stock market and house prices were falling very dramatically at that time. Those measures of wealth and income started to move up quite early in the first half of '09 so the value of people's pension savings started to go up again in the second quarter of 09 and income growth started to recover again over that period of time. But it was a deep, traumatic scar across the economy still. We've got a long way to go to dig out of that, repair that damage. But most of that damage was done - those things started to stabilize when the president's policies started to get more traction. And they got traction pretty quickly if you look back over that period time. You look at an economy falling at an annual rate of 9% a year and we have positive growth in the summer of 09. You went from an economy that was falling off the cliff to an economy growing. Now growth hasn't been as strong as any of us would like, in part because of Europe and the digging out of the excess debt that created the crisis. But I think in some ways it's a story of how effective and quickly you saw the economy start to stabilize and recover because we went in very forceful and we looked at things very quickly and that made a huge difference. Didn't solve a lot of problems, still a lot of challenges ahead but that was really important. "(****END****) VIDEO PRODUCER: angie---------------------------VIDEO SOURCE: pool----------------------- VIDEO APPROVAL: yes----------------------------VIDEO RESTRICTIONS: none---------------------------------- MARKET EMBARGO (S): none--------------------------------SCRIPT/WIRE SOURCE:treasury geithner