Obama Economics Team Confronts More Bad News

Foon Rhee at Political Intelligence (Boston Globe) reports even more bad news on the economy:

“When President-elect Barack Obama convenes his economic advisers later today in Chicago, the urgency of their task will be only more obvious with the latest depressing numbers.

“The Labor Department reported this morning that the unemployment rate jumped to 6.5 percent -- the highest in 14 years -- after the loss of another 240,000 jobs. That brings to 1.2 million the total jobs lost this year -- more than half of them since August.

‘“Obama's office said the president-elect, Vice President-elect Joe Biden, and newly named White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel will huddle with the Transition Economic Advisory Board, which it said will ‘help guide the work’ of Obama's transition team in ‘developing a strong set of policies to respond to the economic crisis.’

‘“We're not starting from nowhere," Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard University president, a former treasury secretary under President Clinton, and one of 17 board members, said on NBC's "Today" show. On ‘Today’ and in another appearance on ‘The Early Show’ on CBS, Summers sidestepped swirling speculation that he's in line to become Obama's treasury secretary.

‘“Throughout his campaign the president-elect has been talking about what we need to do,’ Summers said on NBC. ‘We need to put the middle class at the center of the policy approach in a way that it hasn't been these last years.’

"UPDATE: The nation's largest labor federation said the jobless numbers prove the need for a second stimulus package.

‘“For the first time in eight years, working people heard today's abysmal economic news with a hopeful eye to the future. The election of Barack Obama and a working families Congress carries a silver lining as our economy plunges deeper into a recession. But each day Congress waits to act is another day that our economy worsens," AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in a statement.”’

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