THE White House responded yesterday to the news that a growing percentage of Americans believe Barack Obama to be Muslim by sending out a press release reminding people that he is Christian. Today, the New York Times reports that Mr Obama shouldn't feel alone in being dogged by misperceptions: Timothy Geithner can't seem to convince the world that he never worked for Goldman Sachs . Mr Geithner's predecessor under George Bush, Henry Paulson, was head of Goldman Sachs. And Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary, was co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. And Bush administration heavyweights Joshua Bolten, Robert Zoellick, and Neel Kashkari all worked at Goldman Sachs. So it's understandable if people simply assume that any given Treasury secretary probably worked there at some point. But Mr Geithner never worked at Goldman Sachs. He was chairman of the New York Federal Reserve.

In a smart article explaining why different polls show different levels of conviction that Mr Obama is Muslim, Jon Cohen notes that "the president's detractors are particularly apt to believe negative things about him, and in both polls, most of those who say Obama is a Muslim disapprove of his job performance." It's absurd that people implicitly seem to believe that being Muslim is a negative characteristic. But like people who say Mr Obama is Muslim, people who guess Mr Geithner worked for Goldman Sachs are not so much denoting a putative fact as they are embracing an interpretive theory about the world. In Mr Geithner's case, that theory is not so absurd. Basically, people think that the links between government and business in the financial sector are so tight that they are more like a permeable membrane, with a common supply of personnel and indistinguishable roles and missions.

And this isn't so far from the truth. The most striking thing, for me, in Andrew Ross Sorkin's "Too Big To Fail" was the extraordinary familiarity with which government officials participated in the making of deals to rescue Lehman Brothers and AIG from failure by finding other firms, whether JP Morgan, Bank of America, or Barclays, that might take them over. Henry Paulson was one of those making calls to CEOs to persuade them to consider taking over Lehman Brothers. Timothy Geithner, then at the New York Fed, was another. Ben Bernanke was occasionally asked to make his opinions known to potential dealmakers as well. Of course, they were trying to rescue the global financial system from collapse, an entirely justifiable mission in which the American people had a tremendous stake. Nonetheless, the relationships depicted in those months look less like the Washington Consensus vision of government as neutral, minimally invasive rulemaker for the private sector, and more like the cosy intimacy of South Korea's government with its chaebols.

So people may be justified in believing that senior Treasury Department officials are too cosy with the financial sector they're supposed to regulate. Nevertheless, factual inaccuracies are factual inaccuracies, so here goes: America, Timothy Geithner has never worked for Goldman Sachs.

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