Penny Pritzker, business executive, philanthropist and Obama’s record-breaking national finance chair, seems to have the inside track for the head job at Commerce. Heiress to the Hyatt fortune (Forbes lists her as the 135th richest person in the country, with an estimated net worth of $2.8 billion ), Pritzker created Classic Residence by Hyatt, the leader in luxury housing for senior citizens, and remains its chairwoman. She also cofounded and chairs The Parking Spot, which manages off-site airport parking, and chairs TransUnion, a credit reporting agency, and Pritzker Realty Group. However, Pritzker has attracted controversy because of her stewardship of the Superior Bank of Chicago, which collapsed in 2001 after expanding into the subprime mortgage business. Pritzker, who served as chair of the bank between 1991 and 1994, and continued to serve on the board of its holding company, has stressed that she stepped down seven years before the bank’s collapse and that many of the banks problems were due to accounting errors. “My family voluntarily agreed to pay the FDIC $460 million to help defray costs incurred by the government and other losses in connection with the bank’s closure,” she says in a statement posted on the Obama campaign Website. “We did this without litigation or any allegations by federal regulators of wrongdoing. I am proud of how my family responded to this situation.”

--with Richard Wolffe