As you may have heard, chief White House economic advisor Lawrence Summers has announced that he will be resigning at the end of 2010.
It is presumably accidental that the papers on the last day of summer report that Larry Summers is leaving the administration. There is an exodus of economic officials from the Obama team, and they are mostly going out with hostile commentary. The economy is not booming, and the president’s poll numbers are poor.
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Now that Summers is the third major member of the team to bolt (following Budget Director Peter Orszag and adviser Christina Romer and leaving Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as the only top-level economic adviser remaining from Obama’s original cast), everyone is asking the same question: Who will Obama anoint as Summers’ successor? (The secondary question is “how did he do?
This morning, I was watching long-time White House reporter Chuck Todd’s rather new and rather good show The Daily Rundown and there was talk about the business community’s displeasure with President Obama’s policies. Meet the Press host David Gregory appeared in a segment and shared an anecdote from a recent gathering of CEOs that he attended during which one of the high-power execs told him “the White House has lost everybody in the room.” Gregory followed that up by noting that Obama needs to find a way to turn that around when he is “relying upon the private sector to turn things around.”
So … who is the best man for the job?
According to this list of candidates to become the next director of the White House National Economic Council, it very well might be a woman. Here are Reuters’ top ten candidates, four of which are women and five of which are more firmly rooted in the business world than the economics community. (The article didn’t mention whether the order they are listed in held any significance.)
- Laura Tyson, a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and professor at the University of California, Berkeley
- Diana Farrell, a deputy to Larry Summers on the National Economic Council
- Jason Furman, a deputy to Larry Summers on the National Economic Council
- Ann Fudge, former senior executive at General Mills and Kraft
- Gary Gensler, Chairman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission
- Gene Sperling, Counselor to Treasury Secretary Time Geithner and former Director of the National Economic Council (1996-2000)
- Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics
- Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman and CEO of General Electric
- Richard Parsons, Chairman of Citigroup
- Anne Mulcahy, former Xerox chief executive
Who do you think should take over?