Timothy Franz Geithner is reportedly going to be named Secretary of the Treasury by Barack Obama. He is currently the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Timothy Geithner
Barack Obama has reportedly selected Timothy Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury. Geithner was a member of the Department of the Treasury under Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Geithner’s selection seems to fit Obama’s pattern of selecting old Clinton appointees to his “Change” Administration.
The Treasury Secretary has quite a “to-do” list over the next four years. He has to restore confidence in America’s financial system. He has to oversee a $700 billion bailout of America’s banks, and possibly another multi-billion dollar bailout of America’s failing automobile industry. He will also have to implement Obama’s “spread the wealth” policies that will tax more affluent Americans more than ever before in an attempt to socialize America. We’ll see if Geithner is up to the challenge.
Read about Timothy Geithner’s background below:
Geithner was born in Brooklyn, New York City, on August 18, 1961. Raised in a variety of countries, he graduated high school at International School Bangkok, Thailand. Mr. Geithner graduated from Dartmouth College in 1983 and from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies with a master’s in International Economics and East Asian Studies in 1985.
Upon graduation, he worked at Kissinger Associates, Inc. in Washington D.C. Mr. Geithner joined the Department of Treasury in 1988. He served as Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs from 1999 to 2001 under Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. After the Department of Treasury, he was a director at the International Monetary Fund from 2001 until 2003.
Timothy F. Geithner became the ninth president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on November 17, 2003.
He and his wife, Carole Sonnenfeld Geithner, have two children.
Interestingly, Obama did not mention Geithner when asked about potential Treasury Secretary’s in the final Presidential debate.
See the below responses during the Presidential Debate from Barack Obama and John McCain on who they felt should become the Treasury Secretary:
November 21st, 2008 at 6:09 pm
I’ve seen some reports that his appointment helped the stock market gain a little bit today. As we all know, the stock market started plummeting when it became apparent that Obama was gaining in the polls. Of course, the fact that the democrats have been in control of Congress for the past two years was the primary factor.
So, apparently, some people seem to think at least Geithner might have some knowledge of finances and gives a little more hope for the economy than others in the Obama administration.
November 21st, 2008 at 6:55 pm
I don’t think Geithner had much to do with the stock market. The last two days the market tanked so bad that the S&P was below 1997 levels. I know things are going bad, but there’s no way they’re so bad that we’re worse off than we were before the internet entered our daily lives.
November 21st, 2008 at 8:31 pm
It’s the Obama Recession. A little bounce doesn’t change his problem.
November 22nd, 2008 at 12:16 am
Man people, how much worse can this situation get. The financial problems are bad enough. Now we have Democrats running things. This is akin to having Jamaicans run the war on drugs. We are screwed.
November 22nd, 2008 at 7:35 am
Have we all just time traveled back to the Clinton Administration?
November 22nd, 2008 at 9:18 am
Sheesh people, Geithner joined Treasury under Reagan, and in fact he was a registered Republican for most of his life (and then became an independent). Geithner was a sensible pick that reflects well on Obama’s desire to be pragmatic and not ideological. Give credit where it’s due.
Overall, there are broader economic factors at work that predate, and transcend, the election and politics. Wall Street was cheered by the Geithner leak, but the problems will ultimately not be solved by personnel announcements.
Calling this the “Obama recession” is inane and profoundly ignorant. The roots of this problem began long before the election, and Obama has yet to have any policy impact on the economy because the man won’t even be president for another two months.
November 22nd, 2008 at 10:16 am
the stock market isn’t obama’s fault. Its corporate america’s fault where the big banks and wallstreet and the rating agencies colluded to sell toxic finanical assets globally on a scale never seen before backed in part on mortgages to people who didn’t even have a real paycheck. Its really fraud on an unprecedented scale and nobody believes anything the banks say anymore and they were leveraged 30-1 on fake assets. Separate from all the usual suspects, that is the core reason we are down so much. Its not really a credit problem at all, its a fraud problem. It shut down the game.
And I still don’t know if paulson is a good or bad guy, but he ceo of goldman sacks till 2006 so he too had responsibility for the size of the problem and he knows many of the players at all these top firms and already he has deviated congresses original intention for the tarp. I think his speech on wensday was a de facto resignation and obama appointed geitner and the market rallied 500 points. Trying to affix causality to the players in the market is really an impossible task as short term fluctuations mean very little. What we need is for people to believe again in the markets, for confidence to reboud. for paulson to deviate so quickly on the tarp administration, just dashed confidence again. People now are getting the fact that the american taxpayes bailed out huge banks and firms in return for very little and it won’t be the ultimate solution to the mess. We have to move on from being fraudsters to prudent business people and citizens living within our means again, and not be pysched up into overconsuming and beign so greedy again that we just do this all over again bubble version 8.0. The soviet union went down from a crises in confidence too. nobody believed in it anymore, too many cracks crept in, and they weren’t suicidal so they changed their national business plan. We are not immune either if too many cracks creep in. WE are in a Serious crises of confidence. Carter warned us about this in the seventies and the energy crises and we ignored both his warnings, and here we are today in full blossum of them. Carter should have been a soothsayer as unlike the others, reagan, clinton, bush and bush he was no ideologue. He was the ultimate pragmatist and right about how our future unfolded. REmember he lived through the post veitnamn inflation years and had to really stretch with volker to get control over the economy’s excesses. He understands reality.
November 23rd, 2008 at 12:38 am
This is a lie. You are all liars. Over the past eight years, the wealth of America has been concentrated at the top like no other time since before the Great Depression, and this is the primary reason for our current economic woes. When I say the top, I mean the top–the top one tenth of one percent. We’re talking CEO pay here, which is tens of times, hundreds of times what it was just a few decades ago.
October 10th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
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