Andrew Ross Sorkin’s profile of Tim Geithner in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, pegged to the former Treasury secretary’s just-released book, doesn’t break much news. Most of us who followed Geithner’s career already knew he wanted to bail out Lehman Brothers, opposed nationalizing Citigroup, and tried to spike the Volcker Rule. But I’ll say this for Sorkin’s piece: It includes one of the most revealing Geithner quotes I’ve ever read. It comes at the end of the piece, while Geithner is defending his new job as president of the private equity firm Warburg Pincus. “The private sector is what most people do for a living,” Geithner tells Sorkin. “I thought that the possibility some people would criticize me for not staying a public servant was not a good reason not to go try and learn something new.”

The line is rather preposterous on its own terms. (As if people would have responded the same way had he left Treasury to become a yoga instructor.) But it inadvertently highlights something deeper about Geithner, which is the shocking extent to which he’s accepted financialization of the economy as a benign, even admirable, development. The people who spend their days shuffling trillions of dollars around the globe are really just like you and me, except with nicer offices. They deserve the same sympathy and respect, notwithstanding their abysmal track record. That blinkered view colors pretty much every one of Geithner’s utterances as he makes the rounds hawking books.

To take another revealing example from Sorkin’s piece, at one point Geithner complains about the British government’s efforts to rein in executive pay. “It wasn’t really designed to change comp,” Geithner says. “It was designed to create the impression that they were changing comp. Did it … make them more popular for doing it? No. Was it effective? No.” Most people might look at the British experiment and conclude that the flaw was making a phony effort, as opposed to an actual effort, to rein in compensation. Geithner looks at the British experiment and concludes that the flaw was making the fake effort as opposed to no effort.

Geithner’s most consequential riff has to do with TARP, of course—the $700 billion Congress approved for shoring up banks in the fall of 2008. Geithner’s view of this, which he’s expressed many times before, is that the government had no plausible alternative to backstopping the banks. As evidence of the soundness of this view, he points to the way taxpayers made money on the transaction: $32 billion so far, perhaps over $100 billion before all is said and done.

The amount of nonsense contained in this statement is hard to get your head around. For one thing, it’s close to meaningless to say you made money on a loan or investment and leave it at that. One needs to know how much risk was involved. If I lent your all-but-sure-to-fail company $1 million dollars, and you paid me back my principal plus $1,000, the transaction would not be a testament to my financial savvy. It would attest to how egregiously I under-charged you for the loan, since no one else would have offered such generous terms.