CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said he doesn’t expect President Barack Obama to ask him to stay in office if he’s re-elected, and Geithner dismissed Wall Street’s concerns about financial regulations.
“He’s not going to ask me to stay on, I’m pretty confident,” Geithner told Bloomberg Television on Wednesday. “I’m confident he’ll be president. But I’m also confident he’s going to have the privilege of having another secretary of the Treasury.”
Geithner said he would do “something else.” In August, an administration official said Geithner would stay in his job at least through this year’s election.
The Treasury secretary said in June that his son would be returning to New York to finish high school and that “I’m going to be commuting for a while.”
Before joining the administration in January 2009, Geithner was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a post that put him at the center of the government’s response to the financial crisis of 2008.
Geithner, 50, said he wasn’t concerned about Wall Street complaints over the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul.
“I would not worry too much about them,” Geithner said. “I would worry more about the basic confidence of Americans that they’re going to face more opportunities, more likely to find a job, keep a job, save for college, save for a dignified retirement.”
The unemployment rate in December dropped to 8.5 percent, almost a three-year low, and employers expanded payrolls by 200,000, twice the rate of the previous month and an indication that the job market is gaining momentum.
On Europe, Geithner said leaders there are “making some progress. They’ve got a lot of work to do.” He said he tells European leaders that they need to “put in place a stronger, more credible firewall.”
Geithner was to travel to Davos, Switzerland, late Wednesday for the 42nd annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, his sixth trip to the continent since September. Germany, Europe’s dominant economic power, signaled Jan. 23 that it might back an increase in the region’s overall rescue capacity to $983 billion from $654 billion.
Geithner last visited North Carolina in October when he spoke at a Corning factory and touted the president’s jobs bill that later stalled in Congress.
