Today, as expected, Barack Obama chose Tim Geithner as his Treasury Secretary nominee and Larry Summers as the National Economic Council director. Both are accomplished and highly respected economists with a lot of policy-making credentials. Geithner is the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and helped to orchestrate the bailouts of Bear Stearns and AIG.

Summers, Geithner’s higher-up at the Treasury during the Clinton administration, is currently a professor at Harvard. He is the former President of Harvard (’01-’06) and Clinton’s Treasury Secretary (’99-’00).

I am pleased with Obama’s choices. Geithner has been working closely with current Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and should be able to transition into his new position smoothly. Both Geithner and Summers are well regarded in Washington and on Wall Street. The markets flew up on Friday when word leaked that Geithner would be chosen for Treasury Secretary.

This also sends a strong signal that Obama will be a pro-free trade president, silencing critics on the right. As a result, a backlash has come from the left, noting that, in particular, Summers helped push through a lot of the deregulation that led to the current crisis.

But Obama has made clear that he plans to “re-regulate” the financial industry, and I think we liberals need to trust him on this one. No doubt he has discussed this with his newly-announced team members.

Greg Sargent from TPM puts it better than I can:

…those who might worry that [the choices of Geithner and Summers] portend a shift in Obama’s emphasis should note that thanks to the meltdown and the talk of bailing out major corporations with taxpayer funds, the need for aggressive regulation of Wall Street right now seems far more obvious than it may have in the early 1990s. So it seems unlikely that the choices signal any kind of ideological shift on Obama’s part. Rather, they’re about sending a reassuring message to international markets.