Five People for the Obama-Biden Administration

From Obama World HQ: five very good public servants:

Washington Wire: CHICAGO – President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden officially announced key members of their economic team today, naming Timothy Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury and Lawrence Summers as Director of the National Economic Council. Obama and Biden also named Christina Romer Chair of the Council of Economic advisors, and named Melody Barnes and Heather Higginbottom to serve as Director and Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council.

“Vice President-elect Biden and I have assembled an economic team with the vision and expertise to stabilize our economy, create jobs, and get America back on track. Even as we face great economic challenges, we know that great opportunity is at hand – if we act swiftly and boldly. That’s the mission our economic team will take on,” said President-elect Obama.

The economic team members announced today are listed below:

Timothy F. Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury: Timothy Geithner currently serves as president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he has played a key role in formulating the nation’s monetary policy. He joined the Department of the Treasury in 1988 and has served three presidents. From 1999 to 2001, he served as Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs. Following that post he served as director of the Policy Development and Review Department at the International Monetary Fund until 2003. Geithner is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Lawrence H. Summers, Director of the National Economic Council: Lawrence Summers is currently the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University. Summers served as 71st Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001 and as president of Harvard from 2001 to 2006. Before being appointed Secretary, Summers served as Deputy and Under Secretary of the Treasury and as the World Bank’s top economist. Summers has taught economics at Harvard and MIT, and is a recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to the American economist under 40 judged to have made the most significant contribution to economics. Summers played a key advisory role during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Christina D. Romer, Director of the Council of Economic Advisors: Christina Romer is the Class of 1957 Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has taught and researched since 1988. Prior to joining the faculty at Berkeley, Romer was an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Romer is co-director of the Program in Monetary Economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research and has been a visiting scholar at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

Melody C. Barnes, Director of the Domestic Policy Council: Melody Barnes is co-director of the Agency Review Working Group for the Obama-Biden Transition Team, and served as the Senior Domestic Policy Advisor to Obama for America. Barnes previously served as Executive Vice President for Policy at the Center for American Progress and as chief counsel to Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee from December 1995 until March 2003.

Heather A. Higginbottom, Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council: Heather Higginbottom served as Policy Director for Obama for America, overseeing all aspects of policy development. From 1999 to 2007, Higginbottom served as Senator John Kerry’s Legislative Director. She also served as the Deputy National Policy Director for the Kerry-Edwards Presidential Campaign for the primary and general elections. After the 2004 election, Higginbottom founded and served as Executive Director of the American Security Project, a national security think tank. She started her career as an advocate at the national non-profit organization Communities in Schools.

Comments

[rea]

I must admit that when I heard on the radio this morning that Obama had named a Berkeley economics professor to head the Council of Economic Advisors, I thought our host had been elevated to glory . . . Prof. Romer apparently has some seniority, though.

[Paul Yarbles]

Five very good public servants? Two of them are very good servants of big finance, not the public. Why do economists so often confused 'big finance' with 'the public'? They have completely different spellings.

The conservative NYTs gets something right for once...

"As treasury secretary in 2000, Mr. Summers championed the law that deregulated derivatives, the financial instruments — a k a toxic assets — that have spread the financial losses from reckless lending around the globe. He refused to heed the critics who warned of dangers to come.

That law, still on the books, reinforced the false belief that markets would self-regulate. And it gave the Bush administration cover to ignore the ever-spiraling risks posed by derivatives and inadequate supervision.

Mr. Summers now will advise a president who has promised to impose rational and essential regulations on chaotic financial markets. What has he learned?

At the New York Fed, Mr. Geithner has been one of the ringmasters of this year’s serial bailouts. His involvement includes the as-yet-unexplained flip-flop in September when a read-my-lips, no-new-bailouts policy allowed Lehman Brothers to go under — only to be followed less than two days later by the even costlier bailout of the American International Group and last weekend by the bailout of Citigroup."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/opinion/25tue1.html?hp

Dean Baker agrees...

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=11&year=2008&base_name=the_nyt_gets_it_exactly_right

Just because they call themselves Democrats doesn't mean we have to quit grasping reality with both hands and pretend they are not a bunch of eff ups.

[MQ]

I would have preferred Sheila Bair at Treasury. She's the only person coming out of the finance mess with an enhanced reputation.

[Vasilis]

Prof Delong wrote a few days ago:
"[the NEC chair has two roles] First, to guide the economic policy team as they hammer out a consensus view on what the best economic policy is in order to leave as few points of entry for spin doctors, lobbyists, or rogue vice presidents to twist economic policy in destructive directions. (The Bush II NEC chairs never understood that this was their principal role, and so they were all catastrophic failures at the job.) "

Do you honestly think L. Summers can play the role of consenus builder? Apparently not, as you wrote a more recent post asking who is going to be the consensus builder on the team. So by your criteria, maybe the particular choice wasn't the best *for the job*.