Tom Hoenig For Treasury



The White House is floating, ever so gently, the notion that they are open to nominations for the position of “Tim Geithner’s Successor.”

It’s not clear if they mean this job is likely to be advertised formally sometime in 2012 or 20 minutes after the November midterms. Nor is it obvious if this is a real request for proposals – it could be just an effort to make critics “put up or shut up.”

Fortunately, there is an entirely plausible successor already in waiting, ready now or whenever the president finally realizes the need to fundamentally change banking policy.

Tom Hoenig, president of the Kansas City Fed, is best known for three things.

1. He’s currently the only senior Fed official who has been outspoken (or even spoken out) against banks that are undoubtedly Too Big To Fail (TBTF). Hoenig has been a beacon of clarity on this issue over the past year. Compared with central bank officials – and almost everyone else – Hoenig stands out as a model of straight thinking and a proponent of tough action. With his disarming but no nonsense approach, he is the perfect person to take on the likes of Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs) and Vikram Pandit (Citigroup) both in the corridors of power and in the nitty gritty of their rather sordid business models. Hoenig is a career bank supervisor and nobody’s fool. Blankfein and Pandit are just two more guys who run banks that have gone bad. You know how that movie ends.

2. Hoenig, who sits on the Federal Open Market Committee, is also an inflation hawk – at least by

http://baselinescenario.com/2010/02/...-for-treasury/