Monday, November 24, 2008

Obama Taps Berkeley Economist Christina Romer

Obama's on the move. He's expecting an economic package on his desk, ready to sign, day one. He's officially announcing his economic team later today.
Politico: This should come in handy: Romer was once the co-author of a paper called, “What Ends Recessions?”
The three-person council, appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, is a part of the White House apparatus designed to give the president policy advice and objective economic analysis.

The Romer selection is to be announced by Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden at a news conference at noon Eastern on Monday in Chicago, where he is to present New York Federal Reserve President Tim Geithner as Treasury secretary and Larry Summers, who was Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, as White House economic adviser.

Romer and her husband David Romer, also a Berkeley economist, were both campaign economics advisers to Obama.

In March, National Journal had this précis on the couple: “As professors at the University of California (Berkeley), they are well-known macroeconomists -- experts on the workings of the U.S. economy -- who jointly hold one of six spots on the academic committee of economists that decides when recessions begin and end. They are both steeped in the history of the country's economy and have recently produced a series of papers looking at the causes and effects of most of the major changes in tax policy in the last 100 years.

Peter Orszag is expected to be announced tomorrow as director of the Office of Management and Budget.
NYT: On Tuesday, the president-elect will announce, as expected, that the director of his Office of Management and Budget will be Peter R. Orszag, 39, who currently is Congress’s budget director. Mr. Orszag, along with Mr. Geithner and Mr. Summers, all are protégés of former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, an informal adviser to Mr. Obama.
From Politico's Playbook:
George STEPHANOPOULOS, on GMA, re the president-elect and the economy: 'He's already doing more than any incoming president has ever done this quickly ... One Obama adviser told me what they'd like is a combination of 'Team of Rivals' and 'The Best and the Brightest,' which was the David Halberstam book about the incumbent Kennedy administration. ... [On the emerging Cabinet] We have not seen this kind of combination of star power and brain power and political muscle this early in a Cabinet in our lifetime.'