From 1995-1999, Robert Rubin served as our nation’s 70th Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton and played a leading role in many of the nation’s most important policy debates. His influence will surely be felt in the Obama administration, as the New York Times reports today:

It is testament to former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin’s star power among many Democrats that as President-elect Barack Obama fills out his economic team, a virtual Rubin constellation is taking shape.

The president-elect’s choices for his top economic advisers — Timothy F. Geithner as Treasury secretary, Lawrence H. Summers as senior White House economics adviser and Peter R. Orszag as budget director — are past protégés of Mr. Rubin, who held two of those jobs under President Bill Clinton. Even the headhunters for Mr. Obama have Rubin ties: Michael Froman, Mr. Rubin’s chief of staff in the Treasury Department who followed him to Citigroup, and James Rubin, Mr. Rubin’s son.

All three advisers — whom Mr. Obama will officially name on Monday and Tuesday — have been followers of the economic formula that came to be called Rubinomics: balanced budgets, free trade and financial deregulation, a combination that was credited with fueling the prosperity of the 1990s.

Of course, times have changed since the boom-boom ‘90s and our financial system is now suffering from aftershocks of another order. Rubin comes to the Y in January to talk with Sebastian Mallaby, director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies, about current economic trends and policies. Lawrence Summers, the next head of the White House’s National Economic Council, will appear at the Y in February with Thane Rosenbaum.