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community were dismayed. "Moral hazard!" they cried. "Poorly run institutions must be allowed to fail!" For the next few months, markets continued to erode only gradually, with the acute pain confined to those in the subprime mortgage arena. But then came the crisis of September 2008. "The Street" wanted the government to let Lehman go—a notch in the moral-hazard belt—and the Federal Reserve and the Bush administration obliged. But from that horrible Monday morning when we awoke to Lehman's bankruptcy—the firm at which I enjoyed beginning my Wall Street career and at which I still had many friends—it was clear that things would never be the same.
    I had experienced market crises, but nothing like this. The 1987 stock market crash—unnerving as it was on another Black Monday, October 19—had proved short-lived. The Asian crisis in 1998 had been messier and protracted, but Asia was on the other side of the globe. This meltdown was right here in Manhattan, where we saw friends lose their jobs and much of their net worth. Financial markets began to seize up. Being a private equity guy was no longer a sheltered cove; we had portfolio companies that needed financing and none was available. Meanwhile, the recession that we now know officially began in December 2007 started to affect some of our companies' results, particularly those with substantial advertising revenues. We plunged into intensive reviews of each company, intent on cutting expenses and stretching liquidity as far as possible. The Bloomberg portfolio, conservatively invested, performed better than most of its peers, but the declines still stung. Above all, the sense that no one knew where the bottom was created more widespread terror than I had ever experienced in my Wall Street career. (As determined investors, we tried to find exciting opportunities amid the carnage, but it was hard to summon the courage to run into a burning building.)
    I wasn't shocked—maybe I should have been—that Tim would have mentioned four very diverse jobs. For one thing, government has always placed more confidence in the transferability of skills than the private sector. Perhaps more importantly, all four issues had finance at their core, and all would benefit from a fresh look by people who were not wedded to past models and outmoded approaches. Even solving the auto crisis, I understood, would not be a management assignment like running a corporation; it would be a combination of restructuring exercise (cleaning up the mess) and private equity task (investing new capital). While the Wall Street community includes many who are more expert at both tasks than I, after twenty-six years in finance I felt that my "major" and my "minor" had converged.
    Josh hinted a few days later that I was likely to be offered autos. My first reaction was to think, "But I live in New York!"—as a Manhattanite, I neither knew nor cared much about cars. (I'm a pilot, more interested in planes.) But Josh encouraged me, arguing that I could help prevent the devastation of this iconic industry. Among his many roles, he'd been named the transition team's senior auto adviser and had been scrambling to get up to speed on the ills of Detroit.
    The same week as my job interview with Geithner, the Bush administration committed $17 billion of federal funds to General Motors and Chrysler, putting them on financial life support. The money came with a hodgepodge of conditions, including a mid-February deadline, when the automakers had to submit "viability plans," and another at the end of March, when the new Obama administration would revisit the whole issue. By then the automakers would again be almost out of cash.
    Josh described this state of affairs as "challenging and interesting," perhaps in part because he was eager to hand it off. Another close friend, Senator Chuck Schumer, gave me a different take when we talked at dinner not long after I'd met with Tim. "Autos is a