Quite different from Alan Blinder’s portrayal of Bair.

As an observer of the financial crisis and its aftermath, I have frankly admired most of what she tried to do. She was tough-minded and straightforward. On financial matters, she seemed to have better political instincts than Obama’s Treasury Department, which of course is now headed by Geithner. She favored “market discipline” — meaning shareholders and debt holders would take losses ahead of depositors and taxpayers — over bailouts, which she abhorred. She didn’t spend a lot of time fretting over bank profitability; if banks had to become less profitable, postcrisis, in order to reduce the threat they posed to the system, so be it. (“Our job is to protect bank customers, not banks,” she told me.) And she was a fierce, and often lonely, proponent of widespread mortgage modification, for reasons both compassionate (to help struggling homeowners stay in their homes) and economic (fewer foreclosures would help the troubled housing market recover more quickly).

Source: Sheila Bair’s Exit Interview – The New York Times