TIMOTHY GEITHNER was on every shortlist to take over the US treasury department - for the singular reason that he has been involved in virtually all major efforts to restore stability to shaky financial markets.
Still only 47, he has played a pivotal role as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in a series of dramatic financial rescues, including the central bank's decision to help finance the takeover of Bear Stearns in March.
Geithner joined the treasury department in 1988 and worked his way up to undersecretary for international affairs from 1998 to 2001 under former secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. After stints at the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Monetary Fund, he was named president of the New York Fed in November 2003.
He was involved closely, along with Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and treasury chief Henry Paulson, in negotiations that led to JPMorgan Chase getting a Fed loan to help it acquire Bear Stearns in March.
Then there were the failed efforts to find a buyer for Lehman Brothers, which eventually declared bankruptcy, an event many believe deepened the troubling stresses in financial markets.
Geithner's hand was also in multiple initiatives by the US central bank to set up new emergency programmes to pump cash into the banking system and keep the tap open for needy financial firms to try to induce them to lend normally.
He breaks the mould for recent treasury chiefs since he has neither worked directly on Wall Street nor headed a corporation, but that might be seen positively in a climate where overhaul of the financial regulatory architecture is widely seen as top priority.
A New York native, Geithner has an undergraduate degree in government and Asian studies from Dartmouth College and a graduate degree in international economics from Johns Hopkins University. He has studied Japanese and Chinese.
LAWRENCE SUMMERS will head the National Economic Council, marking his second turn in the Washington spotlight.
Early in 1999 Time put Summers, then number two at treasury, his boss Robert Rubin, and then-federal reserve chairman Alan Greenspan on its cover as "The Committee to Save the World" for their efforts to quell the currency and financial crisis sweeping emerging markets. This time the challenges are even more daunting.
After his last treasury stint, Summers moved on to a controversial tenure as president of Harvard University. He resigned in mid-2005 after a row over whether innate differences accounted for the fact that more men than women entered science and engineering courses.
It wasn't the first time Summers had been in hot water. In 1991, as chief economist at the World Bank, he suggested in a memo that developed countries should export more pollution to poorer ones since those countries would face lower costs from lost wages or illnesses, given that their wages were already so low.
Summers is a proponent of "economic internationalism," a term he used earlier this year in a Financial Times commentary arguing that globalisation has brought benefits to US workers that might be expanded through more free trade agreements. That might be a tough sell among fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill, many of whom express deep misgivings that free trade has meant shipping millions of American jobs abroad.
For Summers, a wunderkind who became a full professor at Harvard at 28 and who has never been known for his smooth manner, it may help that Congress remains under Democratic control and possibly more receptive to his initiatives.
BILL RICHARDSON, who was elected governor of New Mexico in 2002 and re-elected in 2006, but has made no secret of his interest in returning to Washington to take a place in the Obama administration.
A long-shot contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, he endorsed Obama in his primary battle with Clinton, and will be the first senior Latino nomination to the Obama cabinet.
Richardson spent 14 years in the US House of Representatives - from 1983 to 1997 - before being named by former president Clinton as the US ambassador to the United Nations. A year later, Richardson became Secretary of Energy in the Clinton administration . - (Reuters)