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“When news broke that Timothy Geithner was Barack Obama’s pick for Secretary of the Treasury, the stock market jumped more than six per cent in the space of an hour. Obviously, this was a good thing, but there was also something weird about the spectacle of the Street’s once fearless free marketeers exulting over a government appointment, as if they were nomenklatura members cheering a new Politburo chief. It showed just how central a few government officials have become to the well-being not just of the markets but of the economy as a whole. For better or worse, we now live in a world in which the Treasury Secretary controls hundreds of billions of dollars in spending and shapes the fate of some of the nation’s biggest companies. That’s quite a job to ask someone to do.” source...