The Newsweek 50: Obama's Treasury Pick Geithner | Newsweek The Global Elite

15: Timothy Geithner

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But wait, there's more. In the past year, the nation's (and the world's) financial regulatory infrastructure, much of which dates to the New Deal, has crumbled. As the Bernard Madoff affair just revealed, there's something seriously rotten at the Securities and Exchange Commission. The meltdown has either destroyed or called into question longstanding arrangements on banking regulation, and raised new questions: should hedge funds, for instance, be regulated?

America, and the world, requires a new financial architecture for the 21st century. Morris Goldstein, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, has drafted a 10-point list of necessary changes, from boosting bank capital standards to housing-finance reform. How many will Geithner have primary responsibility for? "About half," he says. "You don't get major regulatory reform without the Treasury really pushing hard and being at the forefront."

That's on top of the usual duties of running Treasury's many units: the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Mint, which, judging by the pace at which the Fed is printing money, will have to hire a lot of workers. But the biggest change for Geithner may be in mind-set, rather than in his specific tasks. "It's important that Geithner concentrate not only on putting out financial fires, but also on some far-reaching thinking about effective fire prevention," says David Smick, author of "The World Is Curved." In other words, focus less on cleaning up after bubbles and more on preventing them. In the 1990s, Geithner was a junior member of the Committee to Save the World. This decade, he will be the chairman of the Committee to Stop the World From Blowing Itself Up.

Nos. 13-14: The Clintons