I Am Hearing It Was a Huge Mistake to Invite Mike Allen to the Meeting...
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
Apparently--according to other participants, who put it much much more strongly than Felix does in public--he did not understand what was said, misrepresented what he did understand, and dragged the conversation away from useful substance into pointless and uninformed horse-race speculation.
Not a win by the Treasury team.
Feix Salmon reports on what of substance was discussed:
What Treasury’s thinking: On Wednesday, there was another meeting, this time with professional, salaried bloggers, with a decidedly center-left bias. (Tim Fernholz, Mike Allen, Derek Thompson, Shahien Nasiripour, Nick Baumann, Ezra Klein, me. Matt Yglesias was literally left out in the rain, unable to get past Treasury security.)... Ezra and I both felt a little jealous that we had to compete with Mike Allen asking about politics when we could have listened to a detailed and wonky discussion between Steve Waldman and Tim Geithner on the subject of bailout incentives....
I can tell you that Geithner looked healthier than the past couple of times I’ve seen him: I daresay he’s actually getting some sleep these days, which has got to be a good thing. I also learned a fair amount about how Treasury views the world. The big picture, at least as I grokked it, is that although the recovery started off stronger than Treasury had hoped, the broad economy is still in a pretty weak position. The Fed is doing its part to try to keep a certain amount of momentum going, but fiscal policy is harder, because it needs the cooperation of Congress. And it’s far from clear what kind of fiscal legislation can be passed at this point....
Treasury has no worries about bond bubbles. If corporate debt is trading at low yields, that’s great: it makes it easier for companies to borrow money to employ more people. There also didn’t seem to be much concern about the failure of the Chinese yuan to strengthen visibly against the dollar, even after the authorities there said that they would allow it to do so. Of course the US wants to see a stronger yuan. But it seems happy for China to get there in a relatively slow and unpredictable manner.
On unemployment, there’s definitely concern that the longer people stay out of work, the less employable they become, turning a cyclical problem into more of a structural one. But again, it’s hard to see what Treasury can actually do about that, given political realities...
