CT Voter is "interested to know whether Rubin's position on oversight has changed, given recent events. And whether Larry Summers and Tim Geithner have similar positions."

Wall Street Journal reporting has given us some clues about Geithner's background & orientation:

"Mr. Geithner served as a Treasury attaché in Japan in the 1990s and later at the International Monetary Fund...

Mr. Geithner has spent most of his career managing government responses to financial crises, from the 1990s bailouts of Mexico, Indonesia and Korea, to the debt-market meltdown that has brought Wall Street to its knees this year...

... the likely choice appears to have been driven largely by the financial crisis, and Mr. Geithner's public record on many of the other matters he will be required to grapple with is limited. Unlike previous picks for Treasury secretary, who hailed from Wall Street, industry or the Senate, Mr. Geithner has been a technocrat most of his career.

Mr. Geithner isn't considered close to Mr. Obama, either, an anomaly for one of the most critical positions in the cabinet...

Mr. Geithner has never made a political contribution to any candidate for federal office, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and has worked for both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a senior policy adviser for Sen. John McCain's presidential bid, said that the Republican, had he won, would also have considered Mr. Geithner for the Treasury post. "I don't want this to sound demeaning, but he's an excellent mechanic," Mr. Holtz-Eakin said. "He knows the nuts and bolts."

Mr. Geithner gained respect among Wall Street chiefs over the past year for his hands-on role in the credit crisis. For instance, he was instrumental in engineering the government-assisted rescue of Bear Stearns.

Mr. Geithner (pronounced GYTE-ner) pushed for earlier intervention in the financial markets to stem the financial crisis, and looks likely to continue that activist approach in his new job. Among his first priorities could be a large fiscal-stimulus package...

Mr. Geithner will also be wading into a debate over the future of financial regulation. In March, before the financial crisis had even claimed its first major victim, Mr. Geithner attributed the market turmoil to a combination of market forces and incentives created by policy and regulatory decisions. He said the U.S. government needed to make broad changes to its supervisory structure "to address the vulnerabilities in our financial system revealed by this crisis."

Mr. Geithner was one of the first officials to warn about a financial instrument, known as a credit-default swap, which investors buy to protect against defaults on corporate and other types of debt."

Elsewhere @ WSJ:

"At Treasury starting in 1988, rising through the ranks to become an undersecretary in the Clinton administration, Mr. Geithner learned from Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers to keep options open and became a top official managing the international financial crisis in the late 1990s.

He took over the Federal Reserve Bank of New York five years ago, after working at the International Monetary Fund, without the traditional training of a Fed policy maker — a Ph.D. in economics. (His undergraduate degree, from Dartmouth College, is in government and Asian studies. He also has a master’s in international economics and East Asian studies from Johns Hopkins University.) So in his speeches after taking the top New York Fed post, he focused on risks to the financial system and the importance of addressing them."

And this:

"Mr. Geithner, whose father worked for the U.S. government and the Ford Foundation, was raised in the U.S., Asia and Africa. After college, he worked for Henry Kissinger's consulting firm [where he did research for a Kissinger book] then joined the Treasury Department in 1988. He was a key international aide to Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, then to his successor, Lawrence Summers -- Mr. Geithner's chief rival to become Mr. Obama's Treasury secretary -- and played a role in bailouts of Mexico, Indonesia and South Korea, and also in the decision to allow Russia to default on its debts in 1998.

When the world financial system was shuddering in 1997 -- in a climate of global fear similar to today, though less intense -- Messrs. Geithner and Summers spoke over Thanksgiving weekend that year to hash out a way to craft a rescue package for South Korea. Their boss, Mr. Rubin, was wary of intervening, afraid the country's financial problems were so big that an intervention might not make sense. Messrs. Geithner and Summers disagreed, seeing intervention as a key to stabilizing the country. That night, they crafted a proposal they thought would pass muster with Mr. Rubin, who ultimately agreed to the plan.

It was, in some ways, setting a precedent -- albeit at a much smaller scale -- for the aggressive government interventions now under way.

While Mr. Geithner's record on Wall Street is well-documented, his approach on other issues -- such as tax and trade policy -- is less certain. Generally, Mr. Geithner is seen as a pragmatist, cut out of the mold of two of his main mentors -- Messrs. Rubin and Summers."

And Business Week had this:

"Although not as active as a public speaker as Treasury Secretaries typically must be, Geithner has spoken out strongly in favor of stronger regulation in the financial sector. He has helped lead efforts to establish a central clearinghouse for credit default swaps, securities that offer a kind of insurance against corporate failure and that have been blamed for exacerbating instability in the market.

In June 2007 he called for a tighter focus on the "level and concentration of risk-taking." At the time, he particularly singled out firms writing mortgages with insufficient capital.

He has argued that regulatory policy should explicitly be designed "to improve the capacity of the financial system to withstand the effects of failure and to reduce the overall vulnerability of the system." At the IMF in April, he urged officials to "find a better balance between market discipline and regulation…efficiency and innovation and resiliency and stability."

I don't even see the perception issue. The Republicans I know are as mad as hell at the very rich as I am. "Centrism" may be expedient considering the need to demonstrate stability and competence but it can also become a crutch leaning on old ways of thinking when they need to be kicked out of the way.

Look no further than Campbell Brown and her 'no bias no bull' rants about lobbyists and Obama's campaign promises.

Did Obama say what she says? Yeah. But you know what right now the nation could give less than a damn about some friggin lobbyists pledge!

You know why? Because we are teetering on the brink of economic disaster and this is all she can yammer on and on about?

Why the hell doesn't she focus her 'no bias no bull' diatribes on something of economic importance?

That is what is wrong with the media, it is no different from the auto execs flying in private jets to DC...is that bad PR..you bet! However, it is not worth being incessantly repeated vs. talking about how the collapse of the auto industry will impact the nation as a whole when it comes to the economic cris we are in.

Folks need to quit this petty back biting and wake up and smell the coffee. Our nation is in trouble and folks like Campbell Brown need to be sent to timeout and or detention until they can grow up and talk about issues that are significantly impacting the nation.

I am sick of this partisan food fight verbal bickering and just about every American I know is worried about kitchen table economics.

No. The Democrats got a slim majority that was not enough to stop a filibuster or override a veto (of which there were many). At best it was a standoff.

Pay attention.

Jzap
I agree with you. However, I have decided that Obama is not only an astute politician but he is a brilliant strategist. Perhaps, I cannot discern how this is goign to be beneficial to his administration but obviously, he has.

Just about all these pundits and so called political experts who have second guessed Obama have been completely wrong. So, I am just going to go with Obama on this one.

That is really hard for me because I think this decision on foreign policy is scary. The folks I agreed with on FP were the ones who broke with the Clintonista's and jumped on board with Obama from the beginning like Powers and Rice. I do beleive they will be froze out of any state position now that HRC has been promised her own personnel selections.

Sooo, it is very hard for me to see how this is a good course of action..but I have faith based on Obama's track record of decision making.