After Obama announced plans for an aggressive, two-year economic stimulus package, President-elect Barack Obama has selected the A Class Economic team that will help him to “do what’s necessary” to fix the economy.

“Vice President-elect Biden and I have assembled an economic team with the vision and expertise to stabilize our economy, create jobs, and get America back on track. Even as we face great economic challenges, we know that great opportunity is at hand — if we act swiftly and boldly. That’s the mission our economic team will take on,” said President-elect Obama.

The economic team members announced today are listed below:

Timothy F. Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury

Obama has chosen New York Federal Reserve Bank President Timothy Geithner — who rose to prominence earlier this year as a key official in shaping the US government’s financial rescue measures — to be Secretary of the Treasury.

Geithner played a pivotal role in the intense negotiations which took place before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, and also helped forge the deals involving AIG and JP Morgan. He regularly speaks about the need for major reforms in the financial system in order to avoid further turbulence. Before joining the Federal Reserve of New York, he worked for the International Monetary Fund. He was also the Treasury’s under-secretary for international affairs, from 1999 to 2001.

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The Principles are:

• Energy efficiency: Encourage clients to invest in efficiency measures, taking into consideration the value of avoided CO2 emissions; encourage regulatory and legislative changes that increase efficiency in electricity consumption including the removal of barriers to investment in cost-effective demand reduction.

• Renewable and low carbon distributed energy technologies: Encourage clients to invest in cost-effective renewables and distributed technologies, taking into consideration the value of avoided CO2 emissions. We will also encourage legislative and regulatory changes that remove barriers to, and promote such investments.

• Conventional and advanced generation: Investing in CO2-emitting fossil fuel generation entails uncertain financial, regulatory and certain environmental liability risks. Encourage regulatory and legislative changes that facilitate carbon capture and storage (CCS) to further reduce emissions.

An attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council lauded this move in the bank industry’s news release:

Expectations are rising fast for this industry. Global warming is changing the competitive landscape. Clean power is the name of the game today. Conventional coal facilities are already facing intensive scrutiny. We think the serious money is increasingly going to be on clean, efficient solutions.

But as Matt over at Watthead pointed out, these are just guidelines - the banks are certainly not saying they won’t ever finance another old-fashioned coal plant.

Watthead
Citigroup