Does Gov. Paterson get to pick?
Obama had no choice but to pick Washington insiders. Obama’s not coming from a Governorship or big industry, where he might be able to call on a cadre of experienced, trusted professionals. He has no executive experience, which means he has no first-hand knowledge of the abilities and temperaments of the people he needs to help him. Therefore, the next best thing he can do is pick a bunch of old hands with strong track records. He really had no other choice.
Didn’t Carter and Clinton bring people from GA and AR, respectively, and it backfired hugely on them?
I am really pleased with the Geithner pick. The conventional wisdom was that Summers was more likely but I thought that Geithner was both better on the merits and someone who would work well with Obama.
As NY Fed chairman Geithner brings detailed expertise on the financial crisis and will be ready on Day 1. Summers is very intelligent but he has been out of the loop in the last 8 years as far as economic policymaking is concerned and would have to spend some time learning the intricacies of the crisis. There are also question marks over his temperament and his choice would not have gone down well with the party base.
Geithner is like Obama in several ways. He is young, very bright and has a great temperament. He also has an international outlook which I bet appealed to Obama. Like Obama he spent time abroad as a kid . He has studied Chinese and was the point man for the Treasury in the East Asian crisis.
This is an excellent profile of Geithner:
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=c85b418b-5237-4f54-891f-8385243162bd
I’d add Susan Rice to the list: UN Ambassador.
You mean rebranded protectionism.Excellent for the world economy that Obama is choosing free trade and market oriented staff over hard left neo-protectionists. Perhaps we shall dodge the Neo-Protectionist bullet (1930 part II), dressed up as ‘fair trade’; America would be brilliant in not repeating that error.
I’ve always thought that the Secretary of State should be someone who has served as an ambassador. But typically the person chosen is someone who’s simply good at parroting the president’s message, kind of like the press secretary. Clinton might go beyond that, and I wonder if she’d be comfortable in the position.
As for change, I’ve never expected Obama to transform the government completely. He’s a pragmatist, not a revolutionary. “Change” was a campaign slogan; now he has to get to work. It looks like he’s choosing people who will know how to get started immediately.
Mate, I don’t know what you think Ambos do, but basically they exist to parrot the President / Home Government’s message…
Correlation is not causation. This is a pet peeve of mine about the mainstream non-financial headlines. If there’s a gigantic point drop one day, you can guaran-damn-tee the next day there will be a big upward bounce. That’s just how it goes. It’s always ascribed to “bargain hunting”, otherwise it gets hung on whatever is the big headline that day.
In this case, do we know that the full pop is due to this SoT pick? What would the market have done if no pick were announced? Would it have been higher or lower if it were someone else? Would it have been higher or lower if it were some other bit of minor but tasty news to factor in? Does the fact that the stock market fell the morning after the election mean that Wall Street doesn’t like Obama? I don’t think so.
“If there’s a gigantic point drop one day, you can guaran-damn-tee the next day there will be a big upward bounce. That’s just how it goes. It’s always ascribed to “bargain hunting”, otherwise it gets hung on whatever is the big headline that day.”
Actually it’s not true that big drops on one day are invariably or even mostly followed by a big gain the next day. In any event why would such a big bounce happen precisely at 3pm. It’s much more likely that this was a positive reaction to the Geithner news. Not that this means much; these same markets deserve a large part of the blame for the mess that Geithner is supposed to clean up.
:dubious: There’s no such guarantee. The Dow fell 427 points Wednesday and 445 Thursday - how does that guarantee a 500 point gain Friday? And if that was really true, why was the DJ down as much as 200 points earlier before jumping right at the end of the day?
This is somewhat true.
I said specifically there were other factors. It was the end fo the week, so people were likely covering some positions, and the FDIC’s gurantee thing may have been a factor to name two. And for the last few weeks or even months, the last hour of the trading day has consistently been nuts. I was surprised at first that everybody was chalking the rally up to Geithner*. It wouldn’t make for a good headline, but right now I’d say the reaction appears to be positive. That doesn’t mean it’s approval of Geithner as opposed to approval that a choice has been made at all.
*I wasn’t surprised CNBC was doing it because it was an NBC report.
I know that. But an ambassador usually has to acquire some tact, in addition to parroting the president.
No expert I but it strains credulity to believe that the timing of the market pop and the news had nothing to do with each other. My sense of it is less an endorsement of Geithner per se, but that the market was looking for a reason to pop up. The removal of a certain uncertainty, the sense that perhaps we were one step closer to getting some leadership becoming manifest and with someone who might be able to get things moving even before January 21 on the team as a bonus, was the excuse that the “bargain hunters” needed to jump back in. They’ll jump back out just as fast.
I’ll personally feel much better after ten days of up 50 points a day than I do after one day of 500. This volatility keeps the traders actively engaged in trying to jump ahead in either direction and is hardly the convincing bottom that the investors need to see before they start putting much back in.
A mistake Obama is, clearly, trying to avoid.
I doubt seriously that he is paying attention to such piddly shit as where someone comes from or what “camp” they belong to. I sense that he is filling each position with the person he believes will best facilitate what he wants to accomplish.
It’s also very hard to believe he nominated Clinton (or anyone else) to a very powerful position to just keep his enemies close. It’s unlikely he sees political rivals as enemies in the first place. I thought that was what people liked about him.
Note that while he has appointed his personal political “rivals,” he has not appointed anyone whose politics are bitterly opposed to his own. That would be going too far; such would actively obstruct his agenda.
Are not you getting just a bit tired of typing this by now? Perhaps you have a macro for it.
While you can certainly design a fair trade system that is protectionist, there’s nothing inherently protectionist about fair trade, particularly if you’re dealing with uncompensated negative externalities.