By Kristina Cooke
NEW YORK, Dec 1 (Reuters) - Timothy Geithner, the New York Federal Reserve Bank's president who has been nominated for Treasury Secretary, will not attend the Fed's December policy-setting meeting, a spokesman at the bank said on Monday.
Christine Cumming, the New York Fed's first vice president and the bank's designated alternate at the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) will assume his responsibilities at the Dec. 15-16 meeting, Andrew Williams said by email.
Fed officials whose tenure is ending often skip the last meeting of the panel that makes Fed interest-rate policy.
Cummings stepped in for Geithner at the Sept. 16 FOMC meeting when Geithner stayed in New York to combat the spiraling financial crisis and negotiate a bailout of insurer AIG. At that meeting, benchmark interest rates were left unchanged at 2 percent.
U.S. short-term interest rate futures on Monday implied an aggressive rate cut from the Federal Reserve at the December meeting.
The New York Fed is moving ahead with seeking a permanent replacement for Geithner, Stephen Friedman, the chairman of the bank's board of directors, said last week. The New York board's choice is subject to approval by the Fed's Board of Governors in Washington.
Apart from Friedman, Geithner and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke will likely have the most say in who is selected, economists said. Friedman is a former Goldman Sachs Group chairman and former head of the White House's National Economic Council.
Among the top contenders for the job, Fed watchers say, are Fed Governor Kevin Warsh and New York Fed official Bill Dudley.
Dudley has played a key part in combating the credit crisis, helping to design the Fed's liquidity programs and working directly with the policy-setting FOMC to manage the central bank's interest-rate target. Prior to heading the New York Fed's open-market desk he was a Goldman Sachs economist.
Warsh, too, has been crucial to the Fed's crisis management effort as the Board of Governors' liaison to financial markets. He worked for Friedman at the National Economic Council and was executive director of mergers & acquisitions at Morgan Stanley before joining the Fed in 2006.
Speculation has also returned to those who were in the running in the first round of the last search for New York Fed president in 2003: Peter Fisher, now co-head of fixed income at BlackRock; Roger Ferguson, now chief executive at TIAA-CREF and Stanley Fischer, now the governor of the Bank of Israel.
Other names said to be in the mix include Christine Cumming; Terrence Checki, who heads the bank's emerging markets team; JPMorgan Chase & Co chief executive Jamie Dimon, who sits on the board; and Dino Kos, who ran the New York Fed's markets desk before Dudley and is now at research firm Portales Partners.
The New York Fed is the most important of the 12 regional Fed banks. It serves as the U.S. central bank's most direct link to Wall Street as well as its chief crisis manager.
Geithner, named by President-elect Barack Obama last week as his choice for Treasury Secretary, played a leading role in the talks involving financial firm Bear Stearns and rescuing AIG and Citigroup. He has also been criticized for his role in allowing Lehman Brothers to fail, which touched off a financial panic. (Reporting by Kristina Cooke; Editing by Kenneth Barry)