Boo on you, Forbes meanies, for suggesting our beloved girlfriend Sheila Bair isn’t the most powerful woman in the world. Still, #2 ain’t bad! Who rounds out the top five? Some Pepsi person, a common mineral miner, and the chief executive of Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund. In other words, a pack of nobodies who are probably a real drag at parties, all “I’ll just have a club soda with a slice of lime,” and with nothing to talk about except their work and the INSANE number of frequent flier miles they racked up last year. Sheila Bair, on the other hand, does not get along so well with Tim Geithner, which suggests she has at least the rudimentary genetic material required to grow a Soul. [Forbes]

Mmm, what a tasty way to start a Tuesday morning — with reports of an obscenity-laden tussle between government money nerds over the very sexy topic of bank regulation! Here is what you need to know: Tim Geithner wants a single authority called the National Bank Supervisor providing oversight over our nation’s many banks, and Sheila Bair opposes this consolidation. On Friday, Geithner gathered Bair and Ben Bernanke and Mary Schapiro, the SEC Chairman, to quit running their yaps to newspapers about how much they hated all his ideas. MORE »

Oh dang! Rumor has it that Tim Geithner, our Treasury Secretary-to-be, does not care for our beloved Sheila Bair and her maverick ways. Bair is the chairman of the FDIC and one of the few high-profile Bush administration appointees to very repeatedly and publicly bang the drum about how if our financial crisis is ultimately due to people’s mortgages going south, maybe we ought to work on fixing those bad mortgages. She’s a working class hero! So naturally, Giethner hates her guts. MORE »

Here is something weird, and thank you, First Read, for pointing this out recently: the press has already found out the identity of like half of the future Obama cabinet. And yet we have no idea who’s being vetted to fill one of the most important positions of all — Treasury Secretary. What is up with that HMMM? Will it be the kindly ancient giant Paul Volcker? The stouthearted Kansan Republican Sheila Bair? The repellent NAFTA whore Larry Summers? Nobody knows — or at least, nobody’s telling! Our prediction: Ron Paul, who will unleash a “money bomb” on the United States economy in February of 2009 and then sell us to the nation of Galt’s Gulch for 50 Ameros. [Washington Post]

Money and numbers dorks are all excited this morning, speculating about who Barack Obama might select for the most thankless job in America. Will it be Larry Summers, again? Your editor would kind of like to see the very competent FDIC chairman and level-headed Kansan Sheila Bair get the post, but that’s mostly because Bair was so great on Charlie Rose that one time and Warren Buffett likes her. [Bloomberg]