Richard L. “Jake” Siewert Jr., a veteran of the Clinton White House, is joining the Obama administration as a counselor to his friend, Treasury secretary Timothy F. Geithner.

Word is that Herb Allison, a longtime Wall Street executive with ties to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, will be tapped to head the government’s $700-billion financial rescue program.

Vikram Pandit is still working out a rescue plan that would turn over as much as 40% of his bank to the U.S. government. The question is whether he will manage to hold onto his job.

No team of rivals, this. Top members of the president-elect’s economic team - Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers and Peter Orszag - are all proteges of former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, one of the Democratic architects of the financial deregulation undertaken in the Clinton years.

Timothy Geithner, the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, is expected to be tapped by President-elect Barack Obama to be the next secretary of the U.S. Treasury, reports NBC News.

In his first news conference as president-elect Barack Obama laid out the top priority of his first 100 days: A package of spending that he hopes will stimulate economic growth and aid a struggling middle class.

If there were ever a career civil servant’s Hall of Fame, Timothy F. Geithner would no doubt be an inductee.

The Washington Post had a good profile yesterday of Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who is “facing his first big test as point man between the powerful global firms in the world’s financial capital and the policymakers who oversee them from Washington.”

The Post says Geithner is a strong crisis manager. During the turmoil in the debt markets, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. have been in touch with Geithner regularly.