This was initially posted at McAlvany Intelligence Advisor:
With Monday’s announcement that Jason Furman will be taking over from Alan Krueger as chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, some have asked: who is he?
The short answer is that he is a
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This week President Obama will roll out his strategic jobs growth plan in a major speech, and has announced that his new chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, Alan Krueger, is just the man to help him with it. Krueger comes from the same mold as the man he is replacing, Austan Goolsbee. Goolsbee graduated from Yale, Krueger from Cornell. Goolsbee got his PhD from MIT, Krueger got his from Harvard. Goolsbee worked for the National Bureau of Economic Research, and so did Krueger. Goolsbee is returning to the University of Chicago, while Krueger is leaving Princeton to join Obama.
But the president insists that Krueger will bring him “unvarnished economic guidance…[which is] more important than ever right now. We need folks in Washington to
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Establishment economists and other economic cheerleaders were disappointed to learn that, despite the government’s best efforts to revive the economy through Keynesian interventions and stimuli, the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) for the first quarter of 2011 was half the rate of growth in the last quarter of 2010.
As noted by the Wall Street Journal,
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Republican Minority Leader Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had a strategy even before President Obama was inaugurated, according to the New York Times. Recognizing that Republicans had lost control of the Senate as well as the presidency, that strategy was to use his 30-plus years of political wheeling and dealing to slow down the Democrat juggernaut, and wait for reinforcements.
During the current healthcare debate, McConnell bet that by presenting a united, even if a minority, front against Obamacare, and putting in place delaying tactics, Republicans would force the Democrats to use “parliamentary back flips” to get the bill passed and onto the President’s desk. Such Democrat efforts as reconciliation, the Slaughter tactic, and the “deemer” strategy would so dismay the average American voter as to derail the juggernaut before it became law.
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When he appeared on ABC News‘s This Week on February 7, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was quizzed about the risk of the United States losing its triple-A credit rating, the chances that foreign investors might start shunning US debt, and whether the economy would suffer a double dip recession.
Last week the credit rating agency Moody’s warned that weak economic growth and increasing debt burdens could “put pressure on the country’s triple-A status.” When asked to respond, Geithner said, “Absolutely not. That will never happen to this country.” One remembers the speaker’s rule to be very careful about using absolutes, such as “absolutely”, and “never happen.” History books are filled with examples of events that could “absolutely never happen.”
When MSNBC headlined the report that existing home sales surged by 7.4 percent in November (according to the National Association of Realtors), it suggested that such an improvement boosted “recovery hopes.” Others jumped on the recovery bandwagon, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Alan Blinder.
According to Geithner, it’s now reasonable to expect “positive job growth” by spring and correct to assert that people should have confidence in an improving economy. “I think most people would say the economy actually is strengthening now,” he added.
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