President-elect Barack Obama's economic team is beginning to take shape as he plans to announce on Monday that he has selected Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary and Lawrence Summers to direct the National Economic Council, US information agencies report.

The reports cite Democratic officials close to the transition.
The news that Geithner would likely be named Treasury Secretary helped send the Dow Jones industrial average soaring 500 points after several days of steep losses.

If confirmed by the Senate, Geithner, 47, who served as a Treasury Department official during the Clinton administration, and is currently the president of the New York Federal Reserve, would be the top Cabinet official in charge of leading the administration's response to the global economic crisis.

Lawrence Summers will advise Obama from the White House and would coordinate the federal response to the economic meltdown across several agencies.

Summers, 53, is a former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton and one-time president of Harvard University. During the Clinton administration, Summers helped craft the US response to the Mexico and the Asian financial crisis. As Treasury Secretary he played an important role in negotiating the United States' agreement to allow China to join the World Trade Organization.

Summers also extended the life of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds and had a pivotal role in the US use of used budget surpluses to repurchase Treasury debt for the first time since the 1920s.

Summers' tenure is known as the US longest period of sustained economic growth in its history.

Selection of the Obama economic team comes as the President-elect, in the Saturday weekly Democratic address, offered an outline of his economic recovery plan to create 2.5 million jobs by 2011.

Several key appointments to Obama's communications team were also announced on Saturday.

Ellen Moran will serve as Obama's communications director. Moran is the executive director of EMILY's List -- an organization dedicated to helping Democratic women get elected to office.

The position of press secretary, one of the most highly visible roles in the administration would be filled by Robert Gibbs, an Obama campaign spokesman who also has acted as spokesman for the transition.

Dan Pfeiffer, current communications director with the transition team, will be Obama's deputy communications director. He began work with the Obama campaign in January 2007 as traveling press secretary before returning to Chicago to work as communications director.

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