Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Is the President Bored with the Economy?

Or does he know his advisers don't have a clue?

The Hill reports that the President's  daily economic briefings have stopped showing up on President Obama's daily schedule. Though The Hill does not speculate on an exact date when the meetings stopped, Treasury Secretary Geithner was a mainstay at these meeting.

I receive be email from the Treasury a daily announcement of Geithner's public schedule. I  just searched my emails for "daily briefing White House" and the last notice from the Treasury of Geithner attending a "Daily Briefing" came on  March 9, 2011:

The first schedule item for that day reads:
On Wednesday morning, Secretary Geithner will attend the President’s Economic Daily Briefing at the White House.
The schedule item before that which showed Geithner attending a President's Economic Daily Briefing was on February 2, 2011:
On Wednesday morning, Secretary Geithner will attend the President’s Economic Daily Briefing at the White House. .

Although there were a number of PEDB meetings held in January,2011, they seemed to have ceased being a regular event around February, 2011 and they appear to have stopped being a "daily" event around Thanksgiving of 2010.

It's possible the Treasury started wording them differently on Geithner's calendar after February 2011, but a quick perusal of other Treasury emails of Geithner's schedule doesn't indicate that.

At one time the PEDB was a big deal, as The Hill writes:
Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs announced at his own first daily briefing reporters that Obama asked for the daily economic briefing, described then as comparable to the daily intelligence briefing the president gets every morning.

“The president asked that this be added every day to his schedule,” Gibbs said at the time. Gibbs added that Obama believed it is “important that each day he receive the most up to date information as it relates to the economy.”
According to The Hill, Obama still receives a daily economic briefing on paper.

4 comments:

  1. His superiors probably realized it was too difficult to get anything done because they had to spend the whole briefing coaching him every day on how great the birth/death model and QE are.

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  2. Of course he's sick to death of it. A bunch of tedious (keynesian) snake oil salesmen and assorted eggheads flapping their gums at him with plans that never work and he stops the blame for it.

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  3. I wonder if he's simply given up....maybe he knows something bigger is planned and doesn't care any more.

    It's possible he got tired of plugging his ears and screaming "na na na na...I can't hear you!".

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  4. You know, I wish the state would just collapse and take all this nonsense with it so the productive element could do just that: produce.

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