Paulson on Geithner: ‘He can take a punch’

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner knows how to weather a tough political fight, his predecessor, former Secretary Henry Paulson, said over the weekend.

“I’ve been in the trenches with him,” Paulson told the Wall Street Journal. “He can take a punch.”

Paulson told the Journal that during his own tenure as Treasury secretary, he was in constant touch with Geithner, then the head of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve.

“It’s difficult…to get the politics, the policy and the market reaction all right at any one point in time,” Paulson said of the tough political demands of the job. “It’s virtually impossible to get all three of them right, but if you get any one of them very wrong, then you’re not going to succeed.”