Barofsky met with Geithner in the fall of 2009 to express his concern that the Treasury Department had made TARP unpopular by not being fully forthcoming about how TARP was being used, including not forcing banks disclose how they were spending TARP funds. Geithner got dramatic, [Barofksy writes in his new book, Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street and said] ‘Neil, you think I don’t hear those criticisms? I hear them. And each one, they cut me,’ he said, pausing and then making an emphatic cutting motion with one hand as he said ‘like a knife.’” After a Geithner subordinate in the room, Herb Allison, expressed personal offense at Barofsky’s suggestion that Geithner has not been fully transparent, Barofsky responded, “I am not suggesting that the secretary has failed in transparency, I am stating it. Mr. Secretary, you’ve failed to be sufficiently transparent, and that is one of the reasons why people are so angry. But you can still fix it.” And that’s when the ticking time bomb that was Geithner erupted, telling Barofsky: ‘No one has ever made the banks disclose the type of shit that I made them disclose after the stress tests. No one! And now you’re saying that I haven’t been fucking transparent?’ Cooler heads prevailed, and the meeting went on, but Geithner never really came fully off the boil. “As we parried back and forth, Geithner repeatedly reached a pitch of anger, regaling me with detailed expletive-filled explanations that established my apparent idiocy. He would then calm himself down and give me a forced, almost demonic smile.” After the meeting was over, Barofsky and his deputy, Kevin Puvalowski, had a big laugh about it. ‘In all honesty, I think he was about to come out of his chair and beat the living shit out of you,’ Puvalowski remarked. [HuffPo]