Stocks Soar on Reports of Geithner as Treasury Secretary

Geithner, Similar to Obama

Geithner attended Dartmouth, like his father and current Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, where he earned degrees in government and Asian Studies. While in school, he studied Chinese and spent two summers living in Beijing. He also met his future wife Carole Sonnefeld at Dartmouth. Later, Geithner received his master's degree in international economics at Johns Hopkins where he also studied Japanese.

Living abroad, his father Peter said, exposed Geithner to people from different backgrounds. "I have been most impressed by his ability to bring people with diverse interests together around a table to find some kind of effective solution or steps to be taken."

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Upon graduating, he worked for former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for three years before moving to the Treasury Department where he worked for nearly 15 years. Starting as an assistant attaché in Japan, he eventually came to work for Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers and played a key role in the government's response to the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s.

After a brief stint at the International Monetary Fund, Geithner was selected in 2003 to lead the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That bank, one of 12 across the country, is responsible for implementing the monetary policy established by the Federal Reserve in Washington, including maintaining the key Federal Funds interest rate that banks charge one another for overnight loans.

In this role, Geithner is the point person between Wall Street and the central bank. During the course of the recent financial crisis, he has earned the respect of hard-charging investment bank CEOs, even though he does not have a doctoral degree in economics or a master's in business administration and he has not worked on Wall Street.

Like Obama, he has risen even while bucking the normal route to success.

And like the president-elect, he has reportedly surrounded himself with a group of experienced advisers that include such economic luminaries as former Federal Reserve chairmen Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker; former Treasury Secretaries Summers and Rubin; former New York Federal Reserve chief Gerald Corrigan; Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain; and well-respected financial leader and co-founder of private equity giant Blackstone Pete Peterson, with whom he meets on occasion over breakfast.