Stress Test

Timothy Geithner's 2014 memoir of the 2008 financial crisis, written with journalist Michael Grunwald. As president of the New York Fed from 2003 and Treasury secretary from 2009 through 2013, Geithner was the official responsible for containing the panic after Lehman collapsed — designing stress tests, recapitalising banks, and managing a political firestorm around bonuses and bailouts. The book alternates between crisis narrative and the policy reasoning behind each intervention.

Gates called it "a front row view of the financial crisis" and named it to his 2014 summer reading list; Warren Buffett also recommended it. For a founder, the book is a case study in decision-making under conditions where the old rules have stopped working and the new ones must be invented on live television. Geithner's stress tests — forcing banks to prove they could survive worse losses than they were reporting — are a tool with obvious analogues in a startup: run your worst-case scenario as a public exercise rather than a private guess.

More broadly, Geithner's account shows how organisations that survive a near-death experience learn to build anti-fragile systems afterward. The post-crisis regulatory architecture (higher capital requirements, central clearing for derivatives, living wills) was a deliberate institutional redesign. Founders facing their own 'extend and pretend' moment have the same choice: paper over the problem or restructure so it cannot recur.