Jan 10 2013

UPDATE: Too late for Krugman!

(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Although, the Petition to nominate Paul Krugman for Treasury Secretary continues to circulate and continues to grow in numbers of signatures, President Obama, apparently, had his sights on someone else.  Maybe, he just didn’t know about the Krugman Petition . . . . uh hum!

At any rate, President Obama has chosen Jack Lew, for varying reasons:

President Barack Obama is expected, as early as Thursday, to announce that he has picked White House chief of staff Jack Lew to succeed departing Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

In doing so, according to a source close to the process, Obama is drafting a trusted confidant who played a key role in crafting popular Clinton-era economic policies.

If confirmed by the Senate, Lew, 57, would take the reins from Geithner just in time for a series of confrontations with congressional Republicans on everything from raising the debt ceiling to averting automatic domestic and defense spending cuts to deciding how much to fund government agencies after a stopgap measure expires in late March.

So why pick Lew? The source, who strongly supports the president and Lew-and who declined to confirm published news reports that Obama had settled on the soft-spoken economic policy wonk-laid out a three-part “Why Obama would pick Lew” argument to Yahoo News.

Be sure to read, including “another reason” listed toward the end of the article!    

3 comments

    • TMC on January 10, 2013 at 23:46
    • #

    From his NYT Blog

    Yes, I’ve heard about the notion that I should be nominated as Treasury Secretary. I’m flattered, but it really is a bad idea.

    Part of the reason is that I am indeed the World’s Worst Administrator – and that does matter. Someone else can do the paperwork – but an administrative job requires making hiring and firing decisions, it means keeping track of many things, and that, to say the least, is not my forte.

    Oh, and there’s not a chance that I would be confirmed.

    But the main point, as I see it, is that it would mean taking me out of a quasi-official job that I believe I’m good at and putting me into one I’d be bad at.

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