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News Tip: Finance Professor Available to Comment on Likely Pick of Jacob Lew as Treasury Secretary

"My impression is that Jack Lew has very good management skills, which will help in the debt-limit negotiations," says Campbell Harvey.

Multiple media outlets are reporting President Barack Obama will nominate Chief of Staff Jacob "Jack" Lew to serve as treasury secretary. 

Campbell Harvey Professor of Finance, Duke University Fuqua School of Business cam.harvey@duke.eduhttp://people.duke.edu/~charvey/   Harvey is a finance professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., former editor of the Journal of Finance and founding director of the Duke–CFO Survey. Quote: "The main job of the treasury secretary is to manage the debt. That job is complicated by two things: hitting the debt limit and having to fund trillion-dollar deficits in a way that doesn't increase rates too much. "My impression is that Jack Lew has very good management skills, which will help in the debt-limit negotiations. He is also not disliked among most Republicans, a necessary condition to move forward. "On the debt side, he somehow needs to aggressively lengthen the average maturity of U.S. Treasury debt to prepare for the inevitable rise in interest rates."