Time on New York Federal Reserve chief Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary. "[Geithner] believes the U.S. government allowed the creation of a massive shadow banking system run by investment banks, hedge funds and brokerage firms over the last 30 years that rivaled the traditional system in size but lacked every one of the stabilizing pillars that had been erected beneath it after the Great Depression: deposit insurance, access to a lender of last resort, a system for orderly failure, and reasonable constraints on risk and leverage. With near-bottomless funds from money-market investments and sky-high leveraging limits, the shadow system financed the bubble that is now bursting."[1] Short form: No 'big government' regulation.