When President-elect Barack Obama takes office on January 20 next year, he will have already fully assembled his Oval Office team to assume the full reigns of power. It is expected that for the first time in a Presidential administration, the office of the Secretary of the Treasury will have equal clout as that of the Secretary of State. President Obama will have little choice in this e-arrangement of long held historical protocols because the first three prioritiesin this term will be the economy, the economy, and the economy.
The first economy will be local, i.e. the bread and butter issues that bring home a little extra bacon to the family table. This figured prominently in his campaign promises.
The second economy will be national, how to fix a banking/financial system that has collapsed ushering a crisis not seen since the Great Depression of 1929.
And the third is the international monetary system- that great ship of global financial governance that has lost its way and seem headed towards floundering on shoals of uncertainty. Of all the political leaders on the planet, it is still the President of a weakened United States who will call the shots as to how the repair the almost un-repairable and get some semblance of normalcy back on track.
All three economies are obviously interconnected and definitely, of the first two, one cannot work without the other.
In his book, John Talbott, an unashamed supporter of Obama, calls it “Obamanomics: How Bottom-up Economic Prosperity Will Replace Trickle-down Economics.”
