The next Treasury Secretary?

There's a good deal of speculation these days about the composition of the incoming Obama cabinet. It gets almost as much attention in the broadcast networks' news shows as the choice of a new White House puppy.

One intriuing bit of guesswork is that Timothy Geithner may be the next Treasury Secretary.

Geithner, who since November 2003 has been president of the New York Fed, would be a non-partisan choice, certain of Senate approval sans fireworks. He has held important posts under both the Clinton and the Bush (II) administrations, and is himself an avowed independent.

The New York Fed, institutionally, is the Wall Street annex of the federal reserve system itself. Though the brains of our central bank has to stay in Washington, it has to have both its eyes and its hands in southern Manhattan.

Geithner was profiled in the June issue of Portfolio, by Gary Weiss. In those innocent days, before the Lehman collapse, before the stock market panic of September and October that killed the McCain campaign and led to the nationalization of key financial firms -- before all of that, Weiss focused on Geithner's "informal brains trust," a group of Wall Street luminaries with whom he has been consulting.

These may also be figures of moment in Washington for all or some of the next four years: John Thain; Gerald Corrigan; Paul Volcker. No spring chickens in the group. John Thain is the reative youngster, at a spry 55 years. Volcker was the head of the Federal Reserve in the late Carter and early Reagan years, for goodness sake. Corrigan was Volcker's special assistant in those days.

If the Obama administration recruits its economic team from such a crowd, it will have made the decsion that the country needs some old wise white-haired heads around, for when those emergency calls come in at 3 AM from Greenwich, CT or the Isle of Man.