Paul Volcker Entrusted to Chair Obama’s “Correctional Committee”

In three days, Barack Obama has established an anti-crisis committee. In the wake of the appointment of Timothy Geithner, forty-seven years old, at the Treasury and that of Lawrence Summers, fifty-three years old, to the head of the National Economic Counsel, the president-elect announced yesterday the establishment of a new advisory committee for economic recovery (Economic Recovery Advisory Board).

Led by the former chief of the National Reserve (from 1979 to 1987), Paul Volcker, eighty-one year old, this “counsel of the wise,” directly inspired from the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board created by Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, is expected to offer “an independent voice to economic related questions,” in order to allow the president to set his plan for recovery. “Facing a decisive period for the Nation, the old methods of thoughts and action are not sufficient. We need to revise our approaches,” Barack Obama said yesterday. By establishing the troika of Geithner-Summers-Volcker, the elected president intends to show he is fully aware of the magnitude of the crisis and will make every effort to be operational from the beginning of his mandate.

Positive Signal

In addition to the appointment of Paul Volcker at the head of the board, Austan Goolsbee, a faithful of Barack Obama’s and a brilliant economist from the University of Chicago, is entrusted the role of director and chief economist of this new committee of experts. Composed of representative of the economic and business world, this new body is also an indirect response to the “recycling of Clinton`s team” in Washington, even though Barack Obama fully assumed his appeal to the experience of the “last Democratic administration in place” yesterday. He also approved as a “positive signal” the latest plan to support the debt of the EDF.