Volcker would be solid Treasury candidate: Stiglitz

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz said on Wednesday that former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker would be "the kind of person" suited to be Treasury Secretary in the incoming Obama administration.

Volcker, one of President-elect Barack Obama's principle economic advisers, has the deep knowledge that financial markets would need to restore confidence and boost activity hit by the 14-month-old credit crisis, Stiglitz said.

"I think Paul Volcker has been speaking out very clearly on what needs to be done," he told Reuters at a post-election panel.

Investors and analysts have made up a short list for what is seen as one of the most important roles in the administration given the tumultuous economic and financial environment. The list includes Volcker, Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and Tim Geithner, President of the Federal Reserve of New York.

"One of the problems right now is that the American people do not have confidence in the current secretary of Treasury because in part they see a whole range of conflicts of interest," said Stiglitz, referring to Hank Paulson, who previously served as chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs.

"Many of the people whose names have been floated around have actually been implicated in some of the deregulation initiatives that got us into this mess -- or who supported, in one way or another, these deregulation initiatives.

"How can you have been such a font of wisdom when you argued for deregulation and now you've seen the light?" Stiglitz said.

Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in New York, in 2001 was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information, and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

(Reporting by Jennifer Ablan; Editing by James Dalgleish)