In recent days, there's been some press coverage of the simmering tensions between Larry Summers and Paul Volcker. You may remember that Volcker, the weirdly tall former-Federal Reserve chairman who vanquished stagflation in the 70s and 80s, was one of the other economic heavyweights announced amidst transition. He was to chair the newly created Economic Recovery Advisory Board -- which would join the Council of Economic Advisers and the National Economic Council, not to mention Treasury and the Federal Reserve, as staffed institutions advising the president on the economy-- which had some apparent weight given that longtime Obama-familiar Austan Goolsbee was serving as its staff director and chief economist. But then you didn't hear much from him again.Volcker blamed Summers for the unwanted rest and relaxation, and tensions exploded into the press this week with a Bloomberg report quoting "people familiar with the matter" who said that Volcker "blames Obama’s National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers for slowing down the effort to organize the panel of outside advisers" and is irritated that "Summers isn’t regularly inviting Volcker to White House meetings and hasn’t shown interest in collaborating on policy or sharing potential solutions to the economic crisis."Yikes. But today, Obama and Volcker announced the composition of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board. The press release tells us that ERAB is "modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board created by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. the Board will provide an independent voice on intelligence issues and will be charged with offering independent advice to the President as he formulates and implements his plans for economic recovery." Fair enough. The members:
- William H. Donaldson, Chairman, SEC (2003-2005)
- Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., President & CEO, TIAA-CREF
- Robert Wolf, Chairman & CEO, UBS Group Americas
- David F. Swensen, CIO, Yale University
- Mark T. Gallogly, Founder & Managing Partner, Centerbridge Partners L.P.
- Penny Pritzker, Chairman & Founder, Pritzker Realty Group
- Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO, GE
- John Doerr, Partner, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers
- Jim Owens, Chairman and CEO, Caterpillar Inc.
- Monica C. Lozano, Publisher & Chief Executive Officer, La Opinion
- Charles E. Phillips, Jr., President, Oracle Corporation
- Anna Burger, Chair, Change to Win
- Richard L. Trumka, Secretary-Treasurer, AFL-CIO
- Laura D'Andrea Tyson, Dean, Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley
- Martin Feldstein, George F. Baker Professor of Economics, Harvard University
A distinguished group, to be sure, and a good mix of labor, business, and, uh, former Reagan economists. Whether the somewhat unwieldy group will have much sway against the White House-based bureaucratic juggernaut that is Larry Summers, however, remains to be seen. Anyway, Obama's full remarks on the commission follow the fold:
