MacroScope

Ever wonder how the U.S. Treasury Secretary gets through some of the most economically stressful times this country has seen in a while -- does he go for long runs? Sleep two hours a night?

Timothy Geithner has been in the job less than a year, and came in after the economy had slumped into recession. Now unemployment is approaching 10 percent, he's had to navigate through an economic stimulus package, and on top of all that the weakness of the U.S. dollar has other countries questioning whether it should still be the reserve currency.

Enough problems, we imagine, to give anyone a big giant headache and more than a few sleepless nights.

So what does Geithner do under the weight of it all?

"I've been in the middle of this for quite a long time," he said in an interview at the Reuters Washington Summit on Tuesday. (Remember, before this job, Geithner was president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank).

His general approach, Geithner said, is to "focus on trying to make sure you're making the best of a bunch of bad choices."

You’ve heard of Helicopter Ben Bernanke. What about Bazooka Ben? Barclays Capital strategist Michael Pond thinks it’s time for the Federal Reserve to pull out the really big guns and announce it will buy $1 trillion in U.S. Treasury debt in order to counteract a recent jump in Treasury and mortgage interest rates.

The Fed has already said it would buy up to $300 billion, but this week’s bond market drama suggests that investors are beginning to worry that this isn’t enough.

“We tongue-in-cheek believe that the Fed needs to take the approach from former Treasury Secretary Paulson’s quote at a July 15 Senate Banking Committee meeting that ‘if you have a bazooka in your pocket and people know it, you probably won’t have to use it,’” Pond wrote in a note to clients. “While this didn’t work for Secretary Paulson, as he eventually had to use that bazooka and more, the Fed should try to come up with a big enough number that the threat of that purchasing power alone will be enough to keep rates low. For now, we believe that number is $1 trillion and recommend that the Fed make an announcement soon, rather than wait for its June 24 meeting.”