The Wall street Journal reports today that Lee Sachs, a counselor to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, will be leaving the administration in April. Since the early days of the transition in 2008, Sachs has generally been the senior Treasury aide in charge of overseeing the administration’s response to the financial crisis.

Just wanted to engage in a little crass self-promotion for those who come directly to The Stash, or who took the Internet off for Columbus Day: I have a piece in our current issue about the tennis-playing habits of the Obama economic team--Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and Gene Sperling, et al--which, I half-seriously suggest, can be understood as a metaphor for their West Wing interactions. It turns out most of the group has attended tennis camp together for the last several years:

For the handful of people in charge of saving the U.S. economy, it’s been a grueling season. The last eight months have featured endless back-and-forths, tense stalemates, and spirited confrontations. Larry Summers, the president’s chief economic adviser, has drawn blood with his lacerating quips. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has dropped expletives to signal his frustration. Even their aides have gotten in on the action.

And, in those rare instances when the wonks get a break, they step outside their conference rooms, loosen their ties, and do the same thing all over again. On a tennis court. For years, Summers, Geithner, and a variety of deputies have stared each other down from opposite sides of a three-foot-high net. These tennis relationships have played out on courts from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to Davos, Switzerland, and on pretty much every flat surface in Washington, D.C. It turns out that tennis is the unofficial sport of the Obama financial team. And, if you want to understand the way its members go at it behind closed doors, it’s worth watching them go at it with tightly strung rackets.

Barack Obama has the type of mind--orderly, analytical, well-read--that takes naturally to the study of ideas. But he's always been uncomfortable describing himself in ideological terms. Is he a liberal? During the campaign, Obama would mock those who applied the label to him: "There's nothing liberal about wanting to reduce money in politics," he'd say. "There's nothing liberal about wanting to make sure [our soldiers] are treated properly when they come home." Is he a moderate?

Earlier this summer, when the Obama campaign announced that Jason Furman was joining its staff as director of economic policy, the storyline seemed to write itself: Centrist adviser will pull Obama to the right. Furman had first made a name for himself as a wonky twentysomething wunderkind in the later years of the Clinton administration--a period when, to the consternation of many liberals, Clinton emphasized balanced budgets, free trade, and welfare reform.