economic recovery advisory board

The President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB) is a new panel of non-governmental experts from business, labor, academia and elsewhere that President Barack Obama created on February 6, 2009. The board will report regularly to Obama and his economic team on the current economic crisis and possible responses to it. Obama announced this new board on November 26, 2008, and also announced that it will be chaired by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker with campaign economic adviser Austan Goolsbee as staff director and chief economist. In March 2007, Goolsbee wrote a New York Times article defending subprime mortgages which helped trigger the global economic crisis of 2008 which the Recovery Advisory Board is focused on addressing.[1]

The board follows the model of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which then-President Dwight Eisenhower established in 1956.[2] Like the PFIAB, the new advisory board is meant to pierce what Obama called the "insularity" of Washington decision-making processes. In announcing the new board, Obama commented that “The walls of the echo chamber can sometimes keep out fresh voices and new ways of thinking -- and those who serve in Washington don’t always have a ground-level sense of which programs and policies are working.”

The PERAB is supposed to provide that ground-level sense, and Obama said that this mission will be reflected in the board's diverse membership, which will be announced over the next few weeks.[3] Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate in economics and a noted progressive columnist, has argued that, given the centrist makeup of Obama's economic inner circle, the new board could be used to "give progressive economists a voice." He mentioned James K. Galbraith, Larry Mishel, Dean Baker, and Jared Bernstein as progressive economists who might be suitable for the board. [4] Bernstein, however, was subsequently named to a full-time administration position as chief economist and economic policy adviser to Vice President Biden. [5]

According to an Obama transition press release, "The Board will be established initially for a two-year term, after which the President will make a determination on whether to continue its existence based on its continued necessity."[6]

Membership

The President and Volker announced the board's membership on February 6, 2009.

Members from the business world include General Electric chief executive Jeffrey Immelt; James W. Owens, head of Caterpillar; Robert Wolf, chairman and CEO of UBS Group Americas; Mark T. Gallogly, founder and managing partner at Centerbridge Partners L.P.; Penny Pritzker, chairman and founder of Pritzker Realty Group; John Doerr, partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers; Monica C. Lozano, publisher and CEO of La Opinion; and Charles E. Phillips, Jr., president of Oracle Corporation.

Members from labor are Richard L. Trumka, secretary-treasury of the AFL-CIO, and Anna Burger, secretary-treasurer of