US President Barack Obama has made Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner lead White House negotiator in budget talks with Congress aimed at averting the fiscal cliff, a report said Monday. The Wall Street Journal said Geithner was viewed on Capitol Hill as a straight-shooter who had a better chance of brokering a deal than Jacob Lew, Obama's former budget chief who has burnt his bridges with some Republicans.
If no deal is reached before the end of the year, a poison pill law of tax hikes and massive spending cuts, including slashes to the military, comes into effect with potentially catastrophic effects for the fragile US economy. The report said Geithner, who is preparing to leave his post as treasury secretary early in Obama's second term, has spent months already preparing for the fiscal talks, which will begin this week in earnest in Washington. Geithner will be joined by White House budget and tax experts, including Lew, now Obama's chief of staff, and National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling, the Wall Street Journal said.
They will try to hammer out an elusive compromise with congressional aides but final decisions will be made by political leaders such as Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner, the report said. In recent days, several leading Republicans have indicated a willingness to accept a deal that includes more revenue from ending loopholes in the tax code in return for cuts in funding to Democrats' beloved welfare programs. Geithner, 51, is not affiliated with any party and has spent his career in government finance and on the political sidelines.
He first joined the Treasury at age 27. When George W. Bush became president in 2001, he went to work for the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Monetary Fund. At 42, he was tapped to be head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, considered the Fed's second-most influential post because the New York bank interacts directly with a powerful constituency that includes Wall Street.
Despite holding high office in the years leading up to the 2008 financial collapse, when regulatory authorities are accused of having been asleep at the wheel, he was tapped by Obama to lead the recovery. Upon assuming office in early 2009, he was charged with overseeing two major bailout packages worth more than $1.5 trillion and aimed at shoring up the country's distressed banking sector. The administration has said that the stimulus, while costly, averted another Great Depression, while conservative critics have branded it a costly expansion of government that has failed to revive the economy.
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