By selecting Tim Geithner as his Treasury secretary, Barack Obama has opted for a figure who plausibly represents change while also offering a high degree of continuity with both the Paulson Treasury and its Clinton administration pre-decessors.

Mr Geithner is a protégé of Clinton administration Treasury secretaries Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, and retains close ties with both of them. But the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who is 47, is one of a generation of economic managers who were too young to hold the highest offices of state in the 1990s and are only now coming fully into their own.