Obama Announces New Economic Team

Dear Friend and Reader,

EMPHASIZING THAT the nation’s economic recovery has to involve both “Main Street and Wall Street” President-elect Obama introduced the new White House economic team in a press conference on Nov. 24.

Aside from Timothy Geithner, the new Secretary of the Treasury and the guy whose signature will appear on our money, other economic team members will include Lawrence Summers, new head of the White House Economic Council, Christina Romer, Chair of the Economic Advisory Council and Melody Barnes, Director of the Domestic Policy Council.

Lawrence Summers is an American economist, and currently a Charles W. Eliot University professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Formerly President of Harvard (2001-06), he is the 1993 recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal for his work in several fields of economics and was Secretary of the Treasury for the last year and a half of the Bill Clinton administration. In three instances during his time as Harvard president, Summers made remarks that touched on political “hot-button” controversies.

Environmentalists, affirmative action advocates, many women and those concerned with women’s issues took offense and brought increasing pressure on Harvard, contributing to his resignation. Summers also proposed reforming undergraduate education and requested that professors take greater responsibility in teaching their undergraduate classes, as opposed to delegating to teaching fellows. His resignation resulted in hundreds of millions in pledged contributions being canceled by donors; Summers was widely supported by Harvard college alumni, as well as students and faculty at Harvard University’s professional schools (in particular Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School).

He became a part-time managing director of the investment and technology development firm D. E. Shaw & Co. In November 2008, he was named to Barack Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory Board. Summers is the most controversial of Obama’s economic picks, particularly amongst progressive partisans, who are concerned with Summers’ advocacy of globalization.

Most notable of Christina Romer’s accomplishments is her research of the causes of the Great Depression in the United States and how the US recovered from it. She did extensive work on monetary policy in the 1950s, using the notes from the meetings of the Federal Reserve Board meetings to study how the Federal Reserve made its decisions. Her recent work has focused on the impact of tax policy on government and general economic growth. She is a former vice president of the American Economic Association, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship recipient, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a winner of the Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award. Professor Romer is co-director of the Program in Monetary Economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Melody Barnes is Executive Vice President for Policy at the Center for American Progress She is also on the advisory board for president-elect Barack Obama presidential transition team. She is a member of the New York State Bar Association and the District of Columbia Bar Association. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of The Constitution Project. She received her law degree from the University of Michigan and her bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she graduated with honors in history. From 1995 to 2003 Barnes served as chief counsel to Senator Edward Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee. She previously served as the Director of Legislative Affairs for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and as assistant counsel to the United States House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. Barnes began her career as an attorney with Shearman & Sterling.

As job losses increase, consumer spending evaporates and confidence in large financial institutions falters, there seems to be no expectation that the current Administration will accomplish much in the remaining sixty days before a new president takes office. The nation now looks at President-elect Obama as the de-facto President. The announcement of this new team, a mix of Wall Street, beltway pros and economic scholars who range from progressive to not-so progressive implies the President-elect needs to open history books, financial statements, drawers of dirty laundry in the investment banking world and unfold the reams of legislation that shielded these large, lumbering and failing firms from the scrutiny of regulation. He needs to find a way to fix an aging federal infrastructure of roads, bridges and other structure and provide stimulus for nearly one million new jobs.

He will also have to measure the goal posts of what will define success his first year in office. The message of “Wall Street and Main Street” is awfully broad. But without utterly conclusive evidence of the primary causes for the nation’s economic collapse, I’m sure President-elect Obama, like any good lawyer, will be spending his time right now getting deep into the “discovery period” — a forensic examination of the causes and effects of economic policies and special interests that probably originate all the way back to our grandparents’ generation, and which is part of the Gordian Knot he’s going to have to unravel to bring recovery back to the country. At this point, expectations are lowering that he can do this, given the increase of bad news on the financial front. But lowered expectations always benefit the player coming to bat, and this player in particular likes keeping the expectation bar under his control.

Yours and truly,

Fe Bongolan from San Francisco