N.Y. Fed chief an unconventional, but compatible, choice
In many respects, Timothy F. Geithner is an unconventional choice for secretary of the Treasury. With little private-sector experience and none as a commercial banker, he has maintained the lowest of political profiles despite spending most of his adult life in top posts at key government agencies, the last five years as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Like President-elect Barack Obama, who nominated him, Geithner is global in both outlook and upbringing, having spent much of his boyhood in Africa and Asia, where his father, Peter Geithner, worked for a US development agency and later the Ford Foundation. The treasurer-designate and Obama are both 47, born two weeks apart, and have risen quickly in public life with help from networks of influential friends.
Geithner, a protégé of Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary who will be Obama's chief White House economic adviser, holds views on the federal government's role in assuring US competitiveness in a global economy that are in line with the president-elect's.
Speaking in July 2007 to the Forum on Global Leadership in Washington, Geithner said: "Our capacity to adapt to change depends in part on the effectiveness of government policy in a range of areas. Education seems the most obvious of these, but policy in healthcare, in public infrastructure, and many other areas will also play an increasingly important role in determining the relative strength of the US economy in this more integrated world."
The New York native has been deeply involved with Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and current Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in the various responses and bailouts in the financial crisis that has spread from Wall Street to the broader economy. In March, Geithner engineered the Fed's $29 billion emergency financing that delivered Bear Stearns from imminent bankruptcy and into a bargain buyout by a competitor, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Testifying the following month before the Senate Banking Committee, some of whose members were critical, Geithner defended the extraordinary intervention as a way to "avert substantial damage to the economy."
"The market sorts out which companies survive and which fail," he said. "However, under the circumstances prevailing in the markets, the issues raised . . . extended well beyond the fate of one company."
Bear Stearns, however, was merely a warmup for even more dramatic government steps in response to the unraveling of the credit markets, resulting in the partial nationalization of some major banks and the federal government's rescue and acquisition of the insurance giant
Geithner took the helm of the New York Fed, the flagship of 12 regional branches of the US central bank, in 2003 after spending about two years as director of policy development and review at the International Monetary Fund. Prior to that, he spent 13 years in the Treasury Department under Republican and Democratic administrations, rising through the bureaucracy to key posts that culminated with his appointment as undersecretary for international affairs. In various roles at the Treasury, he was a globe-trotting trouble-shooter, negotiating aid packages and reforms in Thailand, South Korea, Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico.
Summers, who valued Geithner's input, praised his former deputy in a Portfolio magazine article last June: "The ego is disengaged, but he's very comfortable with himself and very direct - not promoting himself, but just concerned with doing the right thing."
Timothy Franz Geithner's route to the Treasury began at Dartmouth College, his father's alma mater, where he graduated in 1983 with a bachelor's degree in government and Asian studies. Two years later, he received a master's in international economics and East Asian studies from Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. He has studied Chinese and Japanese.
After completing his education, he worked for Henry Kissinger's firm, where he helped research a book for the former secretary of state before entering the Treasury Department.
A profile in The New Republic described him as a "moderate Republican" before switching his voting registration to independent in the Clinton administration. He remains unenrolled in a political party, according to records in the Westchester County town where he and his wife, the former Carole Sonnenfeld, reside with their two children.
Since at least 1992, he has not contributed to the campaigns of any candidate for federal office, including president, according to a search of Federal Election Commission records.
However, his mother, Deborah Geithner, a self-employed piano teacher who gave as her address the family's longtime summer home in Orleans on Cape Cod, made a $400 donation to Obama's campaign on Sept. 29, FEC records show. 