Crisis management team

Cover Story sidebar | Ideological moderates head new economic posts | Mark Bergin

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Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, 47, apologized to Congress during his confirmation hearing for failing to pay tens of thousands of dollars in personal self-employment taxes. But the former head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank is less apologetic about spending the tax dollars of others. National Economic Council head Lawrence Summers, 54, the former president of Harvard University and treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, walks close to Geithner both in friendship and economic philosophy. Both men favor considerable public spending to remedy market woes.

"There seems to be a new vogue for the kind of Keynesian economics of the 1960s, where it was thought that fiscal policy could cure all of our economic ills," said Lawrence White, professor of economic history at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. "It's really been kind of a puzzle to those of us who thought that had all been discredited. The new consensus, we thought, was that it's monetary policy that's really important."