Timothy Geithner (born August 18, 1961, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) is an American public official who served as president and chief executive officer (CEO) of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (2003–09) and as secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury (2009-13) in the administration of Pres. Barack Obama.
Geithner’s father, Peter Franz Geithner, worked for the Ford Foundation’s regional development programs in Asia and Africa. Geithner’s family traveled extensively throughout Asia and eastern Africa during his childhood. He attended high school in Thailand, and in 1983 he earned a bachelor’s degree in government and Asian studies from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Two years later he received a master’s degree in international economics and East Asian studies from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
After graduation Geithner became a research assistant at Kissinger Associates, an international consulting firm founded by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In 1988 Geithner joined the Treasury Department and held a number of positions within the agency’s international affairs division. While there he worked closely with Lawrence H. Summers, who served as secretary of the Treasury (1999–2001) under Pres. Bill Clinton. Summers regarded Geithner as a gifted official with a deft political touch. In 1999 Geithner was promoted to undersecretary for international affairs in the Treasury Department, and he represented the department at meetings of the Group of 8 (formerly and subsequently the Group of 7), an intergovernmental organization that convenes an annual gathering of leaders of major industrialized countries to discuss international economic issues.
Geithner left the Treasury Department in 2001, and later that year he was named director of policy development and review at the International Monetary Fund. He remained in that role until 2003, when the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s board of directors nominated him to serve as its president and CEO. While not formally trained as an economist, Geithner brought extensive experience with international monetary policy to the position, and he became an advocate for greater transparency and increased government oversight within the financial industry. As the federal government’s unofficial liaison to Wall Street (the set of major financial institutions based in New York City), Geithner was a key decision maker in efforts to address the financial crisis of 2007–08 and the ensuing Great Recession of 2007–09. He personally oversaw JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s federally backed takeover of the failed investment bank Bear Stearns in March 2008, and he spent the rest of that year helping to craft the Federal Reserve’s response to a series of corporate failures within the banking and insurance industries.
Having been nominated by Obama to serve as secretary of the Treasury, Geithner was confirmed by the Senate in a 60–34 vote on January 26, 2009. As secretary, he was tasked with leading the administration’s efforts to avert a global economic collapse and to promote economic recovery in the United States. In March 2009 he laid out a comprehensive plan to relieve banks of the financial liabilities they had created through bad housing loans (see subprime lending) and massive investments in now-worthless mortgage-backed securities. Geithner’s proposal, which involved mandatory stress tests of banks and other financial firms as a condition of large government bailouts, ultimately helped the financial industry to regain its footing. Geithner was also a key contributor to Democratic-sponsored legislation designed to reduce the likelihood of future financial crises and to protect investors and consumers. The resulting Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010), also called the Dodd-Frank Act, strengthened government oversight of banks and established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was authorized to regulate subprime mortgage loans and other forms of consumer credit.
Geithner stepped down as secretary of the Treasury in January 2013 at the start of Obama’s second term and was replaced in February by Jacob Lew. In November 2013 Geithner accepted a job offer from the New York-based global private equity firm Warburg Pincus, becoming its president and managing director in March 2014. Geithner also served as a lecturer at the Yale University School of Management. He is the author of Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises (2014) and a coauthor (with Ben Bernanke and Henry M. Paulson) of Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons (2019).