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Obama nominates Treasury secretary

(chinadaily.com.cn/agencies)
Updated: 2008-11-25 09:48

With the US economy being clobbered by bad corporate news one after another, its President-elect Barack Obama has chosen to play a more assertive role as he announced his economic team Monday in Chicago.

Timothy Geithner (R), 47, president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers (L), 53, arrive at a news conference, where U.S. President-elect Barack Obama announced Geithner would be his treasury secretary, and Sommers would be his director of national economic policy, in Chicago, November 24, 2008. [Agencies]

By nominating Timothy Geithner, president of the US Federal Reserve Bank in New York who has been heavily involved in the rescue of American giant banks and insurance companies, including AIG and Citigroup, as Treasury secretary, and the Harvard University economist, Lawrence Summers as director of the White House Economic Council, the Wall Street rallied for two consecutive days.

The quicker selection of his economic cabinet, than the usual practice of nominating a President's team of national security, Obama underscored his determination to assure Americans and foreign investors that he would aggressively step into a leadership vacuum in Washington DC during presidential transition.

During a news conference in Chicago, Obama also announced he had chosen Christina Romer to head his Council of Economic Advisers. Romer is an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

The recent economic news, capped by the lately Citigroup rescue effort, “has made it even more clear that we are facing an economic crisis of historic proportions,” Obama told the press. Obama listed the drop in new home purchases, the surge in unemployment claims to an 18-year high and the likelihood of up to a million further job losses in the coming year.

As to his possible policy alternatives on the failing American auto industry, Obama said that the struggling motors in Michigan could not be allowed “simply to vanish,” but that the companies should not get “a blank check” from taxpayers.

At the news conference, Obama made clear that the tax cuts on wealthy American families pushed through Congress by George W. Bush would be repealed, or at least not renewed when they are scheduled to expire in 2010.

Geithner worked through the weekend on the plan to stabilize Citigroup. Earlier, he was deeply involved in the bailout of American International Group. So he is intimately familiar with the developing crisis, and the controversial efforts so far to stanch it.