Enter Geithner, pursued by a bear.

1 ANSWERS

1. Brett
   

   When news broke that Timothy Geithner was Barack Obama’s pick for secretary of the treasury, the stock market jumped more than 6 percent in the space of an hour. Obviously, this was a good thing, but there was also something weird about the spectacle of the Street’s once fearless free marketeers exulting over a government appointment, as if they were nomenklatura members cheering a new Politburo chief.
   
   t showed just how central a few government officials have become to the well-being not just of the markets but of the economy as a whole. For better or worse, we now live in a world in which the treasury secretary controls hundreds of billions of dollars in spending and shapes the fate of some of the nation’s biggest companies. That’s quite a job to ask someone to do.
   
   If anyone is up to the task, Geithner seems to be. A decade ago, as a treasury undersecretary, he helped orchestrate the successful response to the Asian financial meltdown. As head of the New York Federal Reserve, he was prescient about systemic risks to the financial system. And, during the current crisis, he’s the third member of the fire brigade led by the outgoing treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, and the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke.

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