WASHINGTON - MR TIMOTHY Geithner, on Sunday confirmed to be president-elect Barack Obama's pick for Treasury chief, would bring the experience of a Washington insider and a markets technocrat at a time of acute economic peril.

The well-travelled president of the New York Federal Reserve has been at the sharp end of US authorities' battle to shore up panicky financial markets by overseeing the central bank's explosion of intervention in recent months.

The 47-year-old - who also serves as vice chairman of the policy-making Federal Open Market Committee - was key to the bailouts of insurance giants AIG and Bear Stearns, and in the decision to let Lehman Brothers collapse.

But he is also an old Treasury hand, having risen up the ranks of US government from 1988 to 2001 to the peak of undersecretary for international affairs.

'For all the currency traders out there, this means he was in charge of US dollar policy and is steeped in the nuance of the currency markets,' Mr Andrew Busch at BMO Capital Markets commented.

'Unlike during rookies Paul O'Neill or John Snow's tenure, we won't get many mistakes to make easy money,' he said, referring to President George W. Bush's first two Treasury secretaries.

Mr Obama's transition office said he would unveil his economic team at a news conference on Monday and a top advisor said Mr Geithner was the choice for Treasury boss.

As the successor to Republican Henry Paulson, Mr Geithner would become the overseer of a US$700 billion (S$1 trillion) bailout package for distressed banks, which has failed to head off fears of a long and painful recession.

Well before the current crisis erupted in mid-September, Mr Geithner warned that the US and global financial systems were 'going through a very challenging period of adjustment.'

'The critical imperative today is to help facilitate that adjustment and to cushion its impact on the broader economy,' he told Congress, calling for 'substantial reforms' to policy, regulation and oversight governing markets.

'The forces that made the system vulnerable to this crisis took a long time to build up, and the system will need some time to work through their aftermath,' Mr Geithner added, in one of his rare forays into the limelight.

Mr Geithner was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1961. He attended high school in Bangkok, where his father Peter was working as an Asia expert for The Ford Foundation.

Mr Geithner also spent part of his childhood in Zambia, Zimbabwe and India during expatriate stints by his father at the Foundation and later with the US Agency for International Development.

He went on to graduate in Asian Studies from Dartmouth College, which also schooled Mr Paulson, studying Japanese and Chinese while living as a student in the Asian countries.

He began his career at Kissinger Associates, a consulting firm created by former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

On Mr Bush's arrival at the White House in January 2001, Mr Geithner left the Treasury for the Council on Foreign Relations and also worked at the International Monetary Fund before joining the New York Fed in 2003.

Mr Geithner, who is married with two children, echoes Mr Obama in calling for a balance to be struck between innovation and stability when it comes to managing the unruly financial markets.

'Our financial system has many strengths, and we need to examine ways to build on those while making the system more resilient to future shocks,' he said in his July testimony to a House of Representatives committee.

'Until we get through this crisis, it will be hard to make definitive judgments about the appropriate scope and nature of the changes that will be necessary,' he said, using the careful phrasing of an arch-technocrat. -- AFP