Don’t worry, I’m sure Wall St. already has a suitable replacement lined up:
Barack Obama won’t ask Timothy Geithner to stay on as Treasury Secretary if the president wins reelection, Geithner told Bloomberg TV’s Trish Regan Wednesday.
“He’s not going to ask me to stay on, I’m pretty confident,” Geithner told Bloomberg. “I’m confident he’ll be president. But I’m also confident he’s going to have the privilege of having another secretary of the Treasury.”
Geithner, who has been Treasury Secretary under Obama since his inauguration, signaled to White House officials last summer that he was mulling leaving his post after Congress and the President reached an agreement to raise the nation’s debt limit — negotiations in which Geithner played a crucial role. Geithner is the only member of Obama’s original economic team still serving.
Geithner made it the center of his agenda to restore the banks to the pre-crisis status quo, rather than make way for a smaller and less consolidated financial sector, said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
“You have a much more consolidated banking system than you had even back in 2007,” Baker said. “The banks have basically become parasitical on Main Street.”
Baker added that Geithner and others inside Obama’s economic team “totally lost control of the agenda” after passing the stimulus and becoming overly optimistic about the recovery’s prospects. “That just made it very difficult for them to turn around and say, actually, that was wrong, we shouldn’t be focused on deficit reduction. They boxed themselves in,” he said.
