By: Victoria McGrane

President-elect Barack Obama is expected to tap New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner as Treasury secretary on Monday — or earlier, sources say.

Democratic circles had been buzzing for at least a week that the other front-runner for the post, Lawrence Summers, who had headed Treasury for a time under President Bill Clinton, had been crossed off the list.

Obama is also expected to announce other members of his economic team, sources say. A source close to the transition said that the Obama team knows it has to get its top economic advisers in place quickly to reassure Wall Street. The team was already moving, but Thursday’s market losses sped things up more, according to the source.

The Geithner pick should be cheered on Wall Street. A confidant of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Geithner has been at the center of the government’s fast-evolving response to the financial crisis, chairing meetings at his New York office.

Years before the current crisis, he began sounding the alarm about risks associated with a lack of federal oversight over complex financial products. In 2005, at his urging, financial services companies established a national registry to help process and track their trades of credit derivatives, an insurance-like product bought by financial services companies to cover risky subprime mortgage investments.

A career civil servant, Geithner has a reputation for nonpartisan work. At Treasury, he worked under Summers on international issues, taking a front seat during the Asian financial market meltdown in the late 1990s. And his international expertise could be an asset as the current economic crisis grows increasingly global.

“Geithner is excellent,” said Gary Hufbauer, a former Treasury official in the Carter administration who’s now an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

While he personally was pulling for Summers, Hufbauer said, “In every position he’s been in, Geithner has performed just superlatively, so there’s every reason to be optimistic about the choice.”

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