Timothy Geithner

Geithner's paternal grandfather, Paul Herman Geithner (1902–1972), immigrated with his parents to the United States in 1908 from Zeulenroda, Germany.

Geithner's mother, a Mayflower descendant, belongs to a New England family.

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.

His uncle, Jonathan Moore, served in the departments of Defense, Justice and State, as well as in the United Nations.

Geithner spent most of his childhood living abroad, including in Zimbabwe; Zambia; India; and Thailand, where he completed high school at the International School Bangkok.

Timothy Franz Geithner (born August 18, 1961) is an American former central banker who served as the 75th United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013.

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 in Jakarta.

He studied Mandarin at Peking University in 1981, and at Beijing Normal University in 1982.

Like his father, paternal grandfather and uncle; Geithner attended Dartmouth College, graduating in 1983, with an A.B. in government and Asian studies, then earned a M.A. in international economics and East Asian studies from Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, in 1985.

He has also studied Japanese.

Geithner married Carole Marie Sonnenfeld, his classmate at Dartmouth, on June 8, 1985, at his parents' summer home in Orleans, Massachusetts.

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.

She is the author of a coming-of-age children's novel about grief.

Her father, Albert Sonnenfeld, was a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Princeton University and a food critic; her mother, Portia, died when Carole was 25, shortly after she was married.

Geithner worked for Kissinger Associates in Washington, D.C., from 1985 to 1988, when he joined the International Affairs division of the U.S. Treasury Department.

His father, a German American, was the director of the Ford Foundation's Asia program in New York during the 1990s, after working for the United States Agency for International Development in Zambia and Zimbabwe.

He served as an attaché at the Embassy of the United States in Tokyo, then as deputy assistant secretary for international monetary and financial policy (1995–1996), senior deputy assistant secretary for international affairs (1996–1997), and assistant secretary for international affairs (1997–1998).

He was Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs (1998–2001) under Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, who are widely considered to have been his mentors.

While at the Treasury Department, he helped manage financial crises in Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand.

As president of the New York Fed, Geithner was a central figure in the U.S. government's response to the late 2000s financial crisis.

In 2001, Geithner left the Treasury to join the Council on Foreign Relations as a Senior Fellow in the International Economics department.

He was director of the Policy Development and Review Department at the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003.

He was the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2003 to 2009, following service in the Clinton administration.

In October 2003, Geithner was named president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

As president of the New York Fed, he served as Vice Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee.

In 2004, Geithner called on banks to "build a sufficient cushion against adversity", though in May 2007, he expressed support for the Basel II accord, which critics, including Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chairperson Sheila Bair, argued would reduce the amount of capital banks would be required to hold to guard against losses.

That month, in a speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Geithner stated, "Financial innovation has improved the capacity to measure and manage risk," but also cautioned that "financial innovation and global financial integration do not offer the prospect of eliminating the risk of asset price and credit cycles, of manias and panics, or of shocks that could have systemic consequences."

In 2005, Geithner expressed concern over Wall Street trading in financial derivatives, which would ultimately contribute to the spread of the late 2000s financial crisis, though he did not pursue major reforms.

In 2006, he became a member of the Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty.

As President of the New York Fed and Secretary of the Treasury, Geithner had a key role in government efforts to 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; as Treasury Secretary, he oversaw allocation of $350 billion under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, enacted during the previous administration in response to the subprime mortgage crisis.

Geithner also managed the administration's efforts to restructure regulation of the nation's financial system, attempts to spur recovery of 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 Manhattan, New York, to Peter Franz Geithner and Deborah Moore.

In mid-March 2008, together with then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Geithner arranged the rescue and fire sale of Bear Stearns, which was at risk of bankruptcy, to JPMorgan Chase for $2 per share (later raised to $10 per share ).

The Fed agreed to provide financing for the deal and support up to $30 billion of Bear Stearns's "less-liquid assets", despite some internal protests.

In doing so, the New York Fed allowed Bear Stearns itself to calculate the value of assets acquired by the government and exposed itself to losses should those assets have declined in value, though JPMorgan agreed to absorb the first $1 billion in losses.

The New York Fed stored these assets in the Maiden Lane limited liability company and awarded no-bid contracts to the Wall Street asset manager BlackRock for management of the assets, with the intent of ridding itself of the assets within 10 years.

In testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, countering concerns that the rescue would invite moral hazard problems, Geithner argued that "a sudden, disorderly failure of Bear would have brought with it unpredictable but severe consequences for the functioning of the broader financial system and the broader economy."

Under questioning from Senator Chris Dodd, Geithner denied involvement in setting the share price of JPMorgan's purchase of Bear Stearns.

Since March 2014, he has served as president and managing director of Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm headquartered in New York City.