NBC News is reporting that Barack Obama will ask Timothy Geithner to become Treasury Secretary. The announcement is expected Monday and is also expected to include Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and Bill Richardson as Commerce Secretary.

Equity markets appeared to approve of the decision. The Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped more than 200 points in the minutes following the announcement.

Timothy Geithner is the current head of the New York Federal Reserve. He led the bank's efforts to prevent the credit crisis from spreading beyond the financial sector. Before his job at the Fed, Geithner held high-ranking positions at the Treasury, including Undersecretary for International Affairs.

At 47, Geithner is the same age as Barack Obama, and he too has a reputation as a consensus-seeker. Writing at the New Republic, Noam Scheiber describes Geithner as "svelte and baby-faced, with teen-idol locks and a boyish face to match;" yet he also reports that at the Treasury, Geithner would often cast the deciding vote between a restless Larry Summers and a too-cautious Robert Rubin.

Geithner is also known to be nonpartisan. In Merrill Lynch's guide to the FOMC, Geithner is regarded as neutral - alongside Chairman Ben Bernanke - on the spectrum between those how prefer to fight inflation versus those who prefer higher growth.

As chief of the New York Fed, Geithner has earned praise for his calls for regulatory reform. Like Bernanke, he has called for increased transparency at the central bank, and in July he wrote that the financial system must be made "more resilient to future shocks."

Months before Lehman Brothers fell and the latest phase of the crisis set in, Geithner was calling for global initiatives to solve the crisis, and his own past attests to an interest well beyond the scope of just the United States. Geithner attended high school in Thailand; specialized in government, international relations, and Asian Studies at the BA and MA levels; has studied Chinese and Japanese; and has lived in East Africa, India, China, and Japan.

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