Yesterday, Bloomberg News reported that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner may leave his post after the debt ceiling is raised. Within a few hours, a Treasury spokesperson clarified that Geithner has not yet decided whether he'll stay or go once that happens. (There is, of course, always the possibility that the battle over the debt ceiling may be so protracted that Geithner's departure is still eons away.)
If Geithner does at some point depart, though, the administration will face real challenges getting his successor confirmed. It's a safe bet that Senate Republicans will condition the confirmation of his successor on the administration's caving on some fundamental policies. They may insist on disestablishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They may hold out for repealing other sections of Dodd-Frank. They may want to put us on the gold standard or have us revert, Sharron Angle-style, to a barter system. Reality does not constrain them.
The challenge for the president, then, will be to nominate someone whom even the Republicans, in their madness, still would feel obliged to confirm. Mere credentials won't do the trick, not after the Republicans refused to confirm Peter Diamond, a Nobel laureate economist, for a seat on the Federal Reserve, ostensibly due to his lack of qualifications. For a nominee to get through the Senate, he'll have to have the kind of street cred -- and I mean Main Street even more than Wall Street -- to bowl over the opposition.
Warren Buffett is just about the only person who has that kind of cred, though there's no guarantee the GOP wouldn't just block everyone, the Sage of Omaha included. After Buffett, given the current mind-set of the Republicans, the list of likely confirmables is just about exhausted, so my other suggestions fall into the merely desirable category. It's a list of people who bring business and financial credibility and who actually have positive ideas about what to do about the economy, something that Geithner completely and consistently lacked. (Indeed, as my colleague Bob Kuttner has pointed out, pretty much every idea Geither either had or promoted had a negative effect on the recovery, while increasing the likelihood of future financial debacles.) Picking someone better than Geithner is no great achievement. Picking someone actually good does narrow the field, however.
There are virtually no figures currently on Wall Street, for instance, who would support the kind of regulations that America needs to impose on the financial sector, or who wouldn't be a political liability precisely because they hail from Wall Street. (In Nothing to Fear, his terrific book on Franklin Roosevelt's early days as president, Adam Cohen writes that Roosevelt rejected appointing anyone from the J.P Morgan bank to the Treasury Department, because Morgan symbolized all that was wrong with the financial sector. "We simply cannot go along with 23," Roosevelt said -- 23 being the street number of the bank's address on Wall Street.)
Still, two prominent former Wall Street denizens have actually championed policies that would help Main Street. Felix Rohatyn, who for decades headed up the U.S.-based operations of Lazard Freres, has long advocated the establishment of a national infrastructure bank, as well as other financially stimulative polices. And Ron Bloom, who once worked for Rohatyn at Lazard before firming his own boutique bank that specialized in worker buyouts (United Airlines and Weirton Steel, most notably), which he left to become the strategic adviser to the United Steelworkers as the steel industry went through a ferocious period of downsizing and restructuring, has done yeoman service as the deputy head, and then the leader, of the Obama administration's auto task force, where he played a signal role in saving both General Motors and Chrysler (and by extension, much of the American Midwest). Currently the adviser to the president for manufacturing, Bloom is perhaps the leading financial apostle for the kind of industrial renaissance that America manifestly needs.
Another such apostle, though he's no banker, is Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel. A refugee, like George Soros, from Hungarian communism, who fled after the failure of the 1956 uprising, Grove founded Intel along with Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, and headed the company for decades, to nearly universal acclaim. (He was Time's Man of the Year in 1997.) In recent years, he has written widely and trenchantly about America's need to rebuild its manufacturing sector, suggesting the imposition of tariffs on imported goods with the funds going to help those innovative companies that scale up their manufacturing within the U.S.
But since it's unlikely that anyone advocating policies so sensible as those with which Rohatyn, Bloom, and Grove are identified could get past a Republican filibuster, we might as well end this list with a total outlier: Union activist Stephen Lerner, who has organized anti-bank demonstrations in New York, Washington, and other major cities during the past several years, and is an acknowledged expert at mobilizing populist rage. He may not be a financial expert, but this much is clear: Lerner would be the Treasury secretary whom Wall Street deserves.
