OBAMA ANNOUNCES "NEW INSTITUTION" TO BATTLE ECONOMIC CRISIS

[babylonsister]

Obama says he'll have economic plan on his 1st day

SARA KUGLER | November 26, 2008 11:59 AM EST | AP


Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, chairman-designate of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, left, looks on as President-elect Barack Obama speaks during a news conference in Chicago, Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)


CHICAGO — President-elect Barack Obama pledged on Wednesday to have an economic plan ready for action on the nation's financial crisis on his first day in office. "Help is on the way," he declared.

He also said his Cabinet would "combine experience with fresh thinking" and pushed back against criticism that he was recycling former Clinton administration officials as he builds his new economic team.

In his third news conference on the economy in as many days, Obama announced he had chosen former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to head a new White House panel to help create jobs and bring stability to the ailing financial system.

Volcker, 81, will head the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. The board's top staff official will be Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist.

Volcker is a legendary central banker who raised interest rates and restricted the money supply to tame raging inflation in the 1980s. It was a painful prescription that helped send the economy into one of the nation's worst recessions.

"He pulls no punches," Obama said of Volcker. "He seems to be fairly opinionated.":D

more...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/26/obama-to-name-board-of-ec_n_146581.html

[soothsayer]

1. "Help is on the way" is a familiar catchphrase. Was that Kerry?

[babylonsister]

4. Yes! Great memory...

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/29/dems.main/index.html

[BootinUp]

2. Obama brings in the big guns, fer sure.

I like it.

[JVS]

3. The Department of Haulin Ass and Gettin Paid!

[yurbud]

5. Has Austan Goolsbee renounced Milton Friedman, neoliberal economics, etc?

[JVS]

6. I was reading Ben Stein yesterday and he was praising Keynes. I think that we may find soon that...

there aren't going to be any neoliberal economists.

[happychatter]

9. thank YOU, too, for posting - I'm just drinking this up... reading around...

I know jack shit

the more I learn from ya'all the more I realize I don't know

[happychatter]

8. as a Democrat he believes in at least SOME tinkering and regulation

and aren't we looking at the utter failure of Friedman's ideology?

Thanks for posting. Some of us are learning all the time here and you just sent me reading everything I could find linking these two.

It's a little like getting punched, everyone of these guys with dubious affiliations in the administration

Obama is comfortable with them... even when he's yelling at them...

That's how he made that Harvard Law Review position, yeah?

[leftstreet]

7. Obama's Chicago Boys - The Nation

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080630/klein

Obama's Chicago Boys Lookout

By Naomi Klein
June 12, 2008

Barack Obama waited just three days after Hillary Clinton pulled out of the race to declare, on CNBC, "Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market."

Demonstrating that this is no mere spring fling, he has appointed 37-year-old Jason Furman to head his economic policy team. Furman is one of Wal-Mart's most prominent defenders, anointing the company a "progressive success story." On the campaign trail, Obama blasted Clinton for sitting on the Wal-Mart board and pledged, "I won't shop there." For Furman, however, it's Wal-Mart's critics who are the real threat: the "efforts to get Wal-Mart to raise its wages and benefits" are creating "collateral damage" that is "way too enormous and damaging to working people and the economy more broadly for me to sit by idly and sing 'Kum-Ba-Ya' in the interests of progressive harmony."

He chose as his chief economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist on the left side of a spectrum that stops at the center-right. Goolsbee, unlike his more Friedmanite colleagues, sees inequality as a problem. His primary solution, however, is more education--a line you can also get from Alan Greenspan. In their hometown, Goolsbee has been eager to link Obama to the Chicago School. "If you look at his platform, at his advisers, at his temperament, the guy's got a healthy respect for markets," he told Chicago magazine. "It's in the ethos of the , which is something different from saying he is laissez-faire."

Now is the time to worry about Obama's Chicago Boys and their commitment to fending off serious attempts at regulation. It was in the two and a half months between winning the 1992 election and being sworn into office that Bill Clinton did a U-turn on the economy. He had campaigned promising to revise NAFTA, adding labor and environmental provisions and to invest in social programs. But two weeks before his inauguration, he met with then-Goldman Sachs chief Robert Rubin, who convinced him of the urgency of embracing austerity and more liberalization. Rubin told PBS, "President Clinton actually made the decision before he stepped into the Oval Office, during the transition, on what was a dramatic change in economic policy."

more at link

[babylonsister]

11. An article from June? Can't you at least be more current?

I know you can go find an article bashing Obama's selections, now that we know who many of them are.

[BlooInBloo]

10. Holy crap - just how big is that old dude?

[Alter Ego]

12. Goolsbee, eh?

Awesome.

[JeffR]

13. Economic Recovery Advisory Board... Hmm... ERAB...

The freepers were right! Obama is going to turn this country into an Islamic theocracy run by Erabs!!!!!!!111111111111111111111

:silly:

[amitta]

14. 81 yr old Wall Street insider

wow. :banghead:

[slick8790]

16. "81 Year old Wall Street insider"? No, try "brilliant economist who fixed one of the most

challenging economic crises of the last 50 years". I would hardly call him a wall street insider. In fact, I'm fairly sure he's never worked on wall street. But that doesn't matter to you. You're just a reactionary who assumes Obama picking anyone with experience is a lack of "change".

[applegrove]

15. Glad they are getting a good mix of economic advisors. Some experienced in Washington, some not.