Obama dilemma: Wall Street guru or academic for key economic post?

Harvard: Summers return to teaching, research
CAMBRIDGE - Harvard University says Lawrence Summers is returning to teaching and academic research at the Ivy League school after serving as President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser for two years. Summers will be based at Harvard Kennedy School, where he taught before taking a public service leave of absence in early 2009. Summers will also lead the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, which is Harvard’s hub for academic Scholarship, research ...

Roger Altman, Rubinite
In April 2006, Robert Rubin and Roger Altman launched the Hamilton Project under the aegis of the Brookings Institution. The aim, broadly, was to push the kind of fiscally-conservative Liberalism beloved on Wall Street: Rubinomics. At the time, New York Observer columnist Michael Thomas sent Altman the Altman.pdf I’ve embedded below; it makes for hugely enjoyable reading. Thomas sent it to me after reading my post yesterday on Altman and the other members of the shortlist to replace Larry...

Where are the jobs?
In the next 50 years, the American Workforce will be totally different from what we see today because of global economics and Outsourcing. With the Recession in full stride and no end in sight, the American workers have been hit the hardest and finding a new job at the same pay as before is very rare. Blue collar and White Collar jobs are heading overseas in favor of hiring lower wage workers elsewhere in the world leaving the unemployed here wondering what to do next. While outsourcin...

In Defense of Wall Street's Huge Profits
Income inequality has yawned to 80-year high in the last decade and out-sized profits on Wall Street are partly to blame. It's something like dogma among smart Progressives and moderate thinkers I follow that Bankers, Hedge Fund managers, and the entire financial industry make way too much money doing something of way too little social value. So I appreciate this clear and concise defense of finance's huge profits from Scott Sumner. Think about mining, he says. Getting iron out of the ground do...

The Bad Optics of Bill Daley.
Ezra Klein is right about this: The key measure of a Chief of Staff is whether he (or she) will make the White House a more effective operation. Whether Bill Daley likes health-care reform is irrelevant if he successfully works to secure its future. That said, if Daley is the president's pick for chief of staff, the optics couldn't be worse; yes, he is a former commerce secretary, but as the Midwest chairman of JP Morgan & Co., Daley represents -- fairly or not -- Wall Street and its uncomf...

Biden's chief of staff to leave White House
Another one bites the dust. Vice President Biden announced Tuesday that his Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, will resign from his post later this month to return to the Private Sector. The longtime Democratic political operative's name had been floated to replace Rahm Emanuel as President Obama's chief of staff. Emanuel called it quits last year to run for Chicago mayor. Now, the President is considering naming former Commerce Secretary William Daley to a top position, possibly to replace his inte...

Richard Daley's Brother William -- Banker, Lobbyist, NAFTA Advocate -- May Be Obama's Next Chief Of Staff
You know, I woke up this morning and said to myself, "Self, you know what we need? We need another Banker in White House inner circles! You know, someone who understands Wall Street and really "gets" their point of view? Who better than someone from JPMorgan, a firm that's truly above reproach? We've been so hard on them. Isn't it time to forgive and forget? President Barack Obama is considering naming William Daley, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive and former U.S. Commerce secretary, to a h...

Issa, GOP More Interested in Politics Than Oversight
A strong commitment to congressional Oversight is a welcome goal. But the approach incoming chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa, isn’t the way to restore public confidence in government efficiency and ethics. Issa--who called President Obama the “most corrupt [president] in history,” later amending it to the equally absurd charge that Obama is leading an administration that is “one of the most corrupt in history”--has...

Obamacare repeal set for a January 12th vote- Rep. Issa leads charge on fraud
The GOP rebuke of ObamaCare is titled ‘‘Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act’’ and it is exactly two-pages. The Repeal Legislation is the first order of business for the incoming 112th Congress. Looking to make good on a campaign promise House GOP members will call a vote on ObamaCare one week after they take office, January 12. While the vote will be symbolic, Republicans want to let voters know things will be different. The two-page Repeal bill was posted onlin...

Lessons Learned in 2010, Part 1: Fundamentals Matter
With 2010 now over, and an entirely new and less favorable political climate clouding the skies in Washington and many states, it's appropriate to take a quick but definitive look back at the political lessons of this last year. After having mulled over the midterms for a good while, I'm convinced their preeminent lesson to Democrats is to avoid overthinking what happened on November 2. It's easy, after we all painstakingly followed every daily twist and turn in the Obama Administration's st...

Fed: Economy Still Weak Despite Improvements
WASHINGTON (By Pedro da Costa and Mark Felsenthal) - Federal Reserve officials in December felt the U.S. Economic Recovery was still weak enough to warrant monetary support despite growing signs of strength, Fed meeting minutes released on Tuesday showed. Wall Street Economists have been busy revising up their forecasts for Economic Growth in recent weeks on the back of signs showing business activity and Consumer Spending picking up steam. But the Fed's policy-setting panel, which at its Dece...

How Wall Street "got most of what it wants" out of Wall Street reform
Bloomberg has a depressingly comprehensive look at how Wall Street won in the Financial Reform debate, despite having nearly brought the Global Economy to ruin and being the beneficiary of huge Bailouts that saved their collective asses. The U.S. government, promising to make the system safer, buckled under many of the financial industry’s Protests. Lawmakers spurned changes that would wall off deposit-taking banks from riskier trading. They declined to limit the size of lenders or ban an...

Democrat Pixie Dust Strangles Jobs [Reader Post]
Last week the fewest Jobless Claims in 2 ½ years were reported. President Obama and Democrats will likely begin crowing that at long last their policies are beginning to kick in and turn the jobs market around. I’m not so sure. Let’s see how things look in six months as even a blind squirrel trips over a nut every now and then. At the end of the day Democrats are simply ignorant of what it takes to actually create jobs other than those financed by government money, i.e. by takin...

Hugo Chavez Takes Over the Federal Reserve
Time was when countries believed in strong currencies — strength measured not in the Rhetoric of bearded wise men but of bank vaults flush with gold coin. Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez recently announced that he would be devaluing his currency on New Year’s day.  As the Wall Street Journal reported: News of the devaluation came just after the Central Bank said the Venezuelan economy contracted 1.9% in 2010, the second consecutive year of declining output in the oil-rich nation after a...

C&L; Opening Bell: Call the GOP's bluff on the debt ceiling
And the alternative—failing to increase the Debt ceiling? What precise effects would that have? This isn't my area of expertise, but my colleague Alex Hart knows a thing or two about it. Here's what he wrote last week: Recent history provides a sense of just how scary this would be. “The reason the markets calmed down [during the Financial Crisis] is that we took [the banks’] Toxic Assets and handed the Financial Institutions Treasurys,” says Kevin Hassett, a scholar at t...

Jobs vs Benefits: 'Public and private unions squaring off ' in class warfare
Leading with a clip of Governor Chris Christie, Fox News reports that "Public and private Unions" are "squaring off" in a fight over benefits  that may end up the strangest example of class warfare ever - Jobs vs Benefits. I do not bash teachers. I bash their stubborn, self-interested Union. That's who I bash. Private unions, such as iron workers, steel workers and auto workers,  have realized  that feeding the public government employment unions is a strain on their state economi...

Public v. Private Class War
The notion that Wall Street and Main Street are fundamentally at odds with one another remains a popular orthodoxy. So much so that we may be missing the first stirrings of a true American class war: between workers in government unions and their union counterparts in the Private Sector. Read it all. Here is my own take on the same matter. Tagged with: public unions. ...

Fed: Economy still weak despite improvements
By Pedro da Costa and Mark Felsenthal WASHINGTON | Tue Jan 4, 2011 2:04pm EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal Reserve officials in December felt the U.S. Economic Recovery was still weak enough to warrant monetary support despite growing signs of strength, Fed meeting minutes released on Tuesday showed. Wall Street Economists have been busy revising up their forecasts for Economic Growth in recent weeks on the back of signs showing business activity and consumer spending picking up steam. But ...

Fed: Economy still weak despite improvements
By Pedro da Costa and Mark Felsenthal WASHINGTON | Tue Jan 4, 2011 2:04pm EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal Reserve officials in December felt the U.S. Economic Recovery was still weak enough to warrant monetary support despite growing signs of strength, Fed meeting minutes released on Tuesday showed. Wall Street Economists have been busy revising up their forecasts for Economic Growth in recent weeks on the back of signs showing business activity and consumer spending picking up steam. But ...

The Do-Anything Congress
Inside the Beltway, Democrats are touting the achievements of the outgoing Congress.  Historian Alan Brinkley asserted that this is the most productive Congress since the Great Society.  These congratulatory assessments stand in stark contrast to the fact that Democrats, for all their labors, suffered a defeat of such historic proportions that it gave rise to a new word: “refudiation.”  What explains this paradox? First, much of the Legislation passed in the 111th Congress is...

Evansville Convention and Visitors Bureau spends over $3000 on Christmas party
Evansville Convention and Visitors Bureau celebrated Christmas this year with a dinner for the Board Members and their spouses in appreciation for all of the hard work and hours of volunteering throughout 2010. The Evansville Convention and Visitors Bureau is the organization that had proposed the demolition of Roberts Municipal Stadium and the build of a softball complex at that location at a total cost of about $18 million. After much pressure from the community against the project, it was rec...

Andy Plesser: The New York Times is Capturing the "Character-Driven Drama" of Wall Street with Dealbook Videos
The newly expanded Dealbook section of The New York Times, is adding several video elements to its offering in an effort to capture the "character-driven drama" of Wall Street, says Mac William Bishop, Video Producer, in this interview with Beet.TV In addition to traditional three-camera shoots and voiced news packages, Bishop is producing a series of Dealbook Portraits -- interviews done in close-up without a correspondent seen. Last week, The Times published a "portrait" of A.I.G. CEO Robert...

Wall Street climbs in first session of 2011
By Leah Schnurr NEW YORK | Mon Jan 3, 2011 9:26pm EST NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks greeted the new year with a rally on Monday as encouraging signs about the outlook for Manufacturing around the world prompted investors to inject new money into the market. Data from the United States, Europe and China set the tone, helping the Dow and S&P reach new two-year highs and the NASDAQ 100 closed at its highest in nearly 10 years, but some investors think caution may be warranted in the short term...

Wall Street climbs in first session of 2011
By Leah Schnurr NEW YORK | Mon Jan 3, 2011 9:26pm EST NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks greeted the new year with a rally on Monday as encouraging signs about the outlook for Manufacturing around the world prompted investors to inject new money into the market. Data from the United States, Europe and China set the tone, helping the Dow and S&P reach new two-year highs and the NASDAQ 100 closed at its highest in nearly 10 years, but some investors think caution may be warranted in the short term...

Pelosi has no regrets on last day as speaker
Pelosi said Tuesday she looks forward to leading a loyal but tenacious opposition in the House. She started by calling Republicans hypocrites for trying to Repeal President Barack Obama’s Health Care overhaul, saying it would add to the federal Budget Deficit. Republicans won the House majority in the November Elections and John Boehner of Ohio will be sworn in as the new speaker on Wednesday. Pelosi — the first female speaker — will be demoted to Minority Leader. “I don&...