Obama in meeting to heal US economy

Source: Agencies  |   2008-11-8  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

United States President-elect Barack Obama was meeting economic experts in Chicago yesterday to discuss the first steps toward healing the damaged US economy.

Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden were to meet 17 members of their transition economic advisory board. Members include former presidential Cabinet officials and executives from Xerox, Time Warner, Google and the Hyatt hotel company. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett was taking part by phone.

"We're not starting from nowhere," said Lawrence Summers, a Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and one of the members of the advisory board.

"Throughout his campaign the president-elect has been talking about what we need to do. 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," Summers said.

After the meeting, Obama was to hold a press conference that would be his first public appearance since he trounced Republican John McCain. Exit polls from the election showed that the economy was far and away the top issue for voters. More evidence of a recession came yesterday when the government reported that the unemployment rate had jumped from 6.1 percent in September to 6.5 percent in October.

Obama has been meeting privately with his transition team, receiving congratulatory calls from US allies and intelligence briefings, and making decisions about who will help run his government after he is sworn in January 20.

A steady stream of world leaders have congratulated Obama, including Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad's statement marked the first time an Iranian leader has offered such wishes to a US president-elect since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Obama spoke by phone with other world leaders including Australian's Kevin Rudd, Canada's Stephen Harper, Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Germany's Angela Merkel.