Ex-Treasury and IMF Aide Named New York Fed CEO

Timothy Geithner, director of policy development for the International Monetary Fund and a former U.S. Treasury Department official, was named president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Monday, ending a nine-month search.

Geithner, who as a Treasury official helped negotiate financial rescue packages for South Korea in 1997 and Brazil in 1998-1999, will assume one of the most powerful jobs in finance and economics. The New York bank is the most important of the 12 regional banks in the Federal Reserve system because of its daily operations in financial markets and its direct relations with central banks and Wall Street firms.

Unlike most of his predecessors, the 42-year-old Geithner doesn’t have a doctorate in economics, and he has just three years of private-sector experience, at Kissinger Associates from 1985 to 1988. What he brings to the job, people who know him say, are political skills honed over a decade of dealings with bondholders and finance ministries, some of them coping with financial crises.

“Tim Geithner is a great choice for the New York Fed,” said Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, who was Treasury secretary from July 1999 to January 2001. “He is an experienced public servant in the financial sphere.... He’s lived a doctorate in financial policy.”

Geithner succeeds William McDonough, who retired after a decade as chief of the Fed’s top regional bank to become chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.

The New York Fed president has a permanent vote on the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets the level of interest rates. Other regional Fed bank presidents rotate as voters. Three of the four Fed bank presidents now on the committee have doctorates in economics.