HIGHLIGHTS-Reuters TV interview with US Treasury's Geithner

WASHINGTON, May 8 - Following are highlights from Reuters Television's interview with U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Friday.

ON GOVERNMENT SUPPORT FOR GMAC:

"Financing is critical to this process, and that requires that GMAC have the ability to provide loans that Americans need to buy cars. So we're going to provide substantial support to GMAC."

Asked if this would involve a government equity stake, "It's likely again that GMAC will need to take additional capital from the government, and we'll be prepared to provide that."

ON DATA SHOWING PACE OF U.S. JOB LOSS EASED IN APRIL:

"They're encouraging in some sense because the rate of decline in the economy as a whole is slowing. You're seeing some signs of stability. But these are enormously large numbers. You have more than half a million Americans lose their jobs, again, and it just underscores the fact that the economy as a whole is still going through a challenging period."

ON OUTLOOK FOR JOBS MARKET:

"The unemployment rate is probably going to keep growing for a while, realistically. But as the economy stabilizes, then recovers, which we believe will happen over the course of the next half of the year, the second half of the year, then you'll you'll see the rate of the job loss decline, and that will be a good thing. That will be a beginning."

ON FINANCIAL STABILITY, STATE OF CREDIT MARKETS:

Geithner said there had been "a very important reduction in concern about the risk of catastrophic failure of the financial system, about the risk of a much, much deeper recession, and that's very important, and that's due to the actions of the Federal Reserve and the FDIC, as well as, importantly, the president's program."

"The confidence is significantly related to Americans seeing this president, working with Congress, act to help address this crisis aggressively. That has made people a little more optimistic, a little less concerned about the future, and we really want to reinforce that trend."

He said credit markets were starting to open up, with better terms and lower rates. "But it's really just the beginning. We have a long way to go. Access to credit is still enormously tight for the average business, the average American, and we want to reinforce this progress, bring those rates down further."

ON EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION:

"This crisis was caused in part by the fact that compensation practices just got just way divorced from reality. They overwhelmed all the checks and balances ... against the risk of excess leverage. So it is very important that the financial industry change those compensation practices so they are no longer providing strong incentives for excessive short-term risk taking. And we are going to make sure that there are strong standards and protections in place across the entire financial industry so that those type of practices don't go back to where they were over the last decade, and they don't lay the foundation again for another crisis like this ..."

"Across the entire financial industry, we want to see comprehensive reform put in place so that compensation practices do not go back to where they were. They played an important role in laying the foundation for this crisis, and we can't let that happen again."

ON REGULATORY REFORM EFFORTS:

"We're going to be laying out to the Congress the broad comprehensive framework within the next couple weeks, and we hope to move forward quickly with legislation."