They ride on Gulfstreams, set the global agenda, and manage the credit crunch in their spare time. They have more in common with each other than their countrymen. Meet the Superclass.

To get a sense of how the world's elite acts in a moment of global crisis, a moment like the one we are in now, it's instructive to watch a player like Timothy Geithner at work. The New York Federal Reserve Bank president has been at the center of frantic behind-the-scenes efforts to stem the spread of the U.S. credit collapse, to manage the bank run that brought down Bear Stearns, and many crises before it. Slim and youthful Geithner can seem out of place working the phones within the monumental offices of the Fed, done in a style that might be characterized as late-middle mausoleum. Yet it is his very will-o'-the-wisp quality, his deftness, that makes him suited to the modern job of one of the most powerful men in the financial world. Because interest-rate changes and cash infusions have less lasting impact on markets than in the past, the power of central banks is effectively more limited. In today's world, no one institution, not even the U.S. Fed, has the power to contain a crisis. Being a successful central banker now depends on what Geithner calls "a convening power   that is separate from the formal authority of our institution and which can be a very powerful tool."

Speaking to Geithner while I was doing the research for my recently published book "Superclass," he sketched in fascinating detail how the world's power elite rallies when the markets quake. Recalling an earlier crisis in global securities markets that he helped to manage, Geithner said the Fed brought together the leaders of the world's 14 major financial firms, from five countries, representing 95 percent of all the activity in global markets. The Swiss were there, the Germans were there, the British were there. Interestingly, no Asians were there, not even the Japanese. Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein "jokingly called them 'the 14 families,' like in 'The Godfather'," says Geithner. "And we said to them, "You guys have got to fix this problem. Tell us how you are going to fix it and we will work out some basic regime to make sure there are no free riders to give you comfort; you know that if you move individually everybody else will move with you."

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