Obama's Treasury Secretary - As we're seeing, Hank Paulson has had tremendous power in guiding how the government deals with the housing/mortgage/credit crisis. This problem will not be fixed in the 2 months before Obama is inagurated, and his choice of a Treasury Secretary will hugely affect how things are handled, and also send a message about how things will go in the future.
CNN suggests six potential SecTreas nominees: Timothy Geithner, Warren Buffett, Sheila Bair, Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, and John Corzine. Buffett is the celebrity pick, but doesn't seem to want the job. Rubin (director @ Citi), Summers & Corzine (ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs) are pols who bring their own baggage - Geithner is from the Fed, and Bair is from the FDIC, both units that have performed fairly well.
I think Obama should go in a different direction and my pick would be:
YALE ECONOMIST ROBERT SHILLER delivers his forecast for U.S. housing with a scholarly diffidence that only slightly mutes his stark message: The market is in the throes of a bubble of unprecedented proportions that probably will end ugly.
From a Barron's interview in 2005. Shiller also had a pretty good grasp of our prior dot-com bubble.
He was both correct and out front in predicting the two biggest recent financial disasters (by any estimate it's a disaster to so terribly allocate so large a percentage of a nation's capital). Shiller would bring the gravitas to answer the investment banks saying, "we didn't have models to quantify the default risk," with "I did, and was telling you." He wouldn't have to give the Greenspan, "I could never imagine this happening" line.
Two separate economic policy choices face Obama: how to fix our current problems, but almost more importantly, how do we rebuild the regulatory framework so that bubbles are avoided. I think Shiller is the best to handle both tasks.
UPDATE:
Other candidates from comments:
Jospeh Stiglitz
Paul Krugman
Jamie Dimon
Brad DeLong
Michael Greenberger - UMD-Baltimore Professor Bio
Laura Tyson