Timothy Geithner

Biography

Timothy Franz Geithner (/ˈɡaɪtnər/; born August 18, 1961) is a former American central banker who served as the 75th United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013. He was the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2003 to 2009, following service in the Clinton administration. He now serves as president of Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm. As President of the New York Fed and Secretary of the Treasury, Geithner was a key actor in government efforts to respond to and recover from the financial crisis of 2007–08 and the Great Recession. At the New York Fed, Geithner helped manage crises involving Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and the American International Group, and as Treasury Secretary oversaw allocation of $350 billion of funds under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, enacted during the previous administration in response to the subprime mortgage crisis. Geithner also managed administration efforts to restructure the regulation of the nation's financial system,[2] attempts to spur recovery of both the mortgage market and the automobile industry, demands for protectionism, tax reform, and negotiations with foreign governments on global finance issues. Geithner was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Peter Franz Geithner and his wife Deborah Moore. His father, a German American, was the director of the Asia program at the Ford Foundation in New York in the 1990s, after working for the United States Agency for International Development in Zambia and Zimbabwe.[5] During the early 1980s, Geithner's father oversaw the Ford Foundation's microfinance programs in Indonesia being developed by Ann Dunham Soetoro, Barack Obama's mother, and they met at least once.[6] Geithner's paternal grandfather, Paul Herman Geithner (1902–1972), immigrated with his parents to the United States in 1908 from Zeulenroda.[7] Geithner's mother, a Mayflower descendant, belongs to a New England family.[7] Her father, Charles Frederick Moore, Jr., served as Vice President of Public Relations for the Ford Motor Company from 1952 to 1964 and advised President Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as Nelson Rockefeller and George W. Romney on their respective presidential campaigns. Jonathan Moore, Geithner's uncle, served in the departments of Defense, Justice, and State, as well as in the United Nations.[5] Geithner spent most of his childhood living abroad, including Zimbabwe, Zambia, India, and Thailand, where he completed high school at the International School Bangkok.[8] As did his father, paternal grandfather, and uncle, Geithner attended Dartmouth College, graduating in 1983, with an A.B. in government and Asian studies.[8] He studied Mandarin at Peking University in 1981, and at Beijing Normal University in 1982;[9] and earned an M.A. in international economics and East Asian studies from Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in 1985.[8][10] He has also studied Japanese.[11] Geithner married Carole Marie Sonnenfeld, his classmate at Dartmouth, on June 8, 1985, at his parents' summer home in Orleans, Massachusetts.[12] She is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at George Washington University School of Medicine, where she teaches listening skills to medical students.[13] She is author of a coming-of-age children's novel about grief.[14] Her father, Albert Sonnenfeld, was a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Princeton University and a food critic;[15] her mother, Portia, died when Carole was 25, shortly after she was married. The Geithners have two adult children, a daughter named Elise and a son named Benjamin.

Research Interest

Business