US Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner plans to stay into early next year to help the administration of US President Barack Obama forge a deal with lawmakers to avert the looming fiscal crisis, the White House said on Friday.
The Obama administration and the US Congress have less than two months to soften the blow from the “fiscal cliff,” or US$600 billion of tax hikes and spending cuts that will be sucked out of the economy next year if Washington fails to act to change current law.
“Geithner has indicated that he will stay on through inauguration and he will be, obviously, a key participant in the negotiations around the so-called fiscal cliff issues,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.
Photo: Reuters
Geithner has long said he planned to step down if Obama won a second term, after spending grueling time dealing with the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis first as the head of the New York Fed and then as Obama’s Treasury chief.
After helping the White House negotiate last year’s budget deal to raise the debt limit and cut the deficit, Geithner won over many Republicans who viewed him as reasonable and willing to listen to their concerns.
It is not clear who Obama will pick to replace Geithner, but his chief of staff and former budget director, Jack Lew, is seen as a favorite because of his expertise and the fact that budget and tax reform could dominate the administration’s domestic agenda.
The White House did not have a specific date for when Geithner would leave and would not comment on whether he would stay until the administration brokered a deal.
It also was not clear whether the Senate would have the time to confirm Obama’s nominee before the inauguration on Jan. 21 given the urgency of the fiscal talks and number of other key positions that have to be filled.
Obama will have to move quickly to replace US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is planning to leave, as well as CIA Director David Petraeus, who abruptly resigned on Friday citing an extramarital affair.
Another possible contender for the Treasury job is Erskine Bowles, who was Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and was appointed by Obama to help craft a deficit reduction plan.
Roger Altman, a Clinton-era deputy Treasury secretary and co-founder of investment firm Evercore Partners; Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook; and Laurence Fink, the chief executive of asset manager BlackRock, are other names that have been floated.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to