Geithner, Timothy Franz

Geithner, Timothy Franz gītˈnər [key], 1961–, U.S. government official, b. New York City, grad. Dartmouth (B.A. 1983), Johns Hopkins (M.A. 1985). In 1988 he began working at the Treasury Dept., where he held a variety of posts, eventually becoming assistant secretary (1997–98) and under secretary (1998–2001) for international affairs. In 2001 he joined the International Monetary Fund, and two years later he was appointed president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, serving until 2008. Geithner played a key role in the federal government's response to the U.S. financial crisis that began in 2007, and under President Barack Obama served (2009–13) as secretary of the Treasury Dept. A centrist, he advocated nationalizing troubled banking institutions only as a last resort, focusing instead on using a “stress test” to determine which banks would be required to raise additional capital. In 2014 he became president and managing director of Warburg Pincus, a buyout company.

See his memoir Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises (2014) and Firefighting (2019, with B. Bernanke and H. Paulson), which discusses the global financial crisis.

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