Broad standards for compensation

Broad standards for compensation practices would help improve systemic stability, Treasury's Geithner tells House committee. "I do think it's appropriate for the country to put in place strong standards to govern compensation pratice across the financial community as a whole, because as we've seen those can have systemic consequences creating a more fragile and unstable system," Geithner says in response to question. "It's a difficult balance. The government should not be proscribing detailed regulations to govern amounts of compensation and their distribution," he says. However, "we have to hold to broad standards and again make sure that we're not encouraging short term risk taking at the expense of long term stability," Geithner says.