During the financial crisis of 2008, perhaps  no firm is more emblematic of the meltdown then Citigroup (NYSE: C), the  New York  based banking behemoth which required a massive government loan to avert  failure, following a series of bad investments and mismanagement. Now, Shela Bair, the former FDIC chief, alleges that Citigrop’s CEO Vikram Pandit has  Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to thank for keeping his job.

The former financial regulator  Bair says that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was primarily concerned with  shoring up Citigroup and other banks in his response to the financial crisis,  rather than holding those banks accountable. Bair, on a media tour for her new  book “Bull by the Horns” recounts the inner workings of regulators and meetings  with elected officials and top bank representatives as they collectively sought  to stave off failure.

Bair heavily criticizes Geithner  in the book for his role (then as the President of the New York Federal Reserve)  for having the wrong goal in mind. To his credit, similar arguments are made  against Bair in former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s book, and Sorkin’s “Too  Big to Fail”. In those cases, the authors allege Bair failed to understand the  importance of saving the banks from collapse, and the contagion it would have  surely spread.

Bair, who served as chair of the  Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) between 2006 and 2011, states “He  was in constant communication with [Citigroup CEO] Vikram Pandit throughout that  whole process, and I felt like he and Vikram were figuring out what they were  going to do and then trying to jam it on me. I do think that a lot of the policy  decisions that were made were made through the prism of what Citigroup needed.”  “He viewed these institutions as entities that needed to be taken care of,” Bair  said of Geithner, adding he thought the banks “needed to be taken care of and  that this was just a big systemic event, and we needed to protect them –  whereas I wanted them to have accountability. They had caused  this.”

“If you view the banks themselves  as victims just of the larger crisis, then you’re going to just try to help them  however you can, and I think that was his guiding philosophy,” she  added.

The ex post facto criticism of  Geithner and the system in general will likely help sell books and perhaps put  her in good graces of the general public – but the question remains, would  having let them failed actually improved the economy? Most signs point to no.