Timothy Geithner Biography

Timothy Geithner was the Secretary of the Treasury under U.S. President Barack Obama from 2009-13. Geithner spent much of his childhood overseas; his father, Peter Geithner, worked for the Ford Foundation’s Asia program. Timothy Geithner graduated from Dartmouth College in 1983 with a degree in government and Asian studies. He followed that with a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins in East Asian studies and International Economics in 1985. He worked for Kissinger and Associates (the consulting firm of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger) from 1985-88, then joined the Department of the Treasury in 1988. He “worked in three administrations for five Secretaries of the Treasury in a variety of positions,” according to his biography from the Federal Reserve. He also worked at the International Monetary Fund before being named president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2003. Called “relatively young, largely unknown and a proud workaholic” by The Wall Street Journal, Geithner has close ties to Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin, both secretaries of the Treasury under Bill Clinton.  Obama, also a Democrat, chose Geithner for the same post at the start of his first term. Much of Geithner’s time in office was spent wrangling the aftereffects of the economic crash of 2008. He was instrumental in working out the banking deals that helped get things under control in 2009, although critics on the right and left said he was either too hard on, or too chummy with, Wall Street. He stepped down at the end of Obama’s first term, and was replaced in 2013 by Jacob “Jack” Lew.