In his 22nd appearance on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, the US Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, yet another time, defended the Federal Reserve Banks’ $85-billion bailout of the American International Group (AIG) in 2008.

In the rather heated questioning session, in which members of the House Oversight Committee appeared to be cross-examining all statements, Geithner – who was the then President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said that the AIG bailout was an attempt to avoid the company’s calamitous collapse which would have brought the US on the verge of a new Great Depression.

However, the Committee members – most of them Republicans, and a few Democrats – said that they had been fed with such statements earlier too, and they wanted more elaboration on the thus far ‘covered up’ issues.

Though Geithner calmly reiterated that he had, in his opinion, served the country carefully and would continue to do so, there have been complaints galore that the top economic officials of President Obama’s administration had been a little too hasty in extending aid to the banking industry, without bothering much about the troubles of ordinary Americans.

The Committee’s hearing was convened after its senior member Republican Darrell Issa of California revealed that, according to some e-mail messages, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had asked AIG to conceal some important facts about the bailout in its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.