Obama Asks The Same Oligarchs Who Got Us into This Mess to Get out of it

This is disturbing. Obama meets with various CEOs on how to get out of the financial mess.

Obama is seeking support for his plan to stabilize the U.S. financial system and move beyond the furor over bailouts and bonuses. He met with CEOs including Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase & Co., John Mack of Morgan Stanley, Vikram Pandit of Citigroup Inc. and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The meeting began with a discussion about the need to deal with toxic assets and increase bank lending, then moved onto Obama’s plan to resolve the housing crisis, and his proposals for revamping regulations and executive compensation, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said.

“They agreed on the need to update the framework of regulation,” Gibbs told reporters. Obama also emphasized the importance of “recognizing what the American public is going through in this economic crisis,” he said.

Public-Private Partnership

With the U.S. economic recovery tethered to the health of the financial industry, Obama has proposed a public-private partnership to soak up the banks’ toxic assets and help unlock credit, as well as new regulations on banks, hedge funds, private-equity firms and derivatives markets.

“It’s terribly important that an environment of consensus replace the polarization of recent weeks,” said former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt, now a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group based in Washington and a board member of Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News. “It’s essential to the business community that they be very much part of this process,” Levitt said yesterday.

The gathering is the latest in a continuing engagement with the business community, White House advisers said. Obama has held meetings with Dimon and Kenneth Chenault, the CEO of New York-based American Express Co., as well as Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, over the last couple of months, they said.

‘All to Help’

“The president made it clear that he’d like this country to get back on track,” Dimon told Bloomberg Television after today’s meeting. “He wants us all to help.”

While executives told reporters they understood financial regulations needed revamping, they had different prescriptions for new rules. Proposals to bring back Depression-era regulations separating investment banking from commercial banking would be difficult to resurrect, Blankfein said.

“It’s hard to turn back the clock” on the rules, known as the Glass-Steagall Act, Blankfein said in an interview with Bloomberg Television after the meeting.

The Glass-Steagall Act that separated deposit-taking institutions from investment banks was overturned in 1999 with the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill.

Bill Gates? The guy who wants to offshore jobs as fast as possible? Financial CEOs who lobbied to for their own demise?

Dear President Obama,

Stop doing sales, marketing, campaigning and consider instead talking to the many experts out here who are screaming from the roof tops on what needs to happen. It seems you will listen to anyone but them.

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Geithner's and Summer's theory

is probably that a new authority that monitors systemic risk will be enough. This is a huge mistake because any authority is only as good as it is willing to exercise that authority. If we have an administration like Bush's we will be right back in the same situation 10, 20 years from now.

Laws like Glass-Steagall have real teeth.

Might as Well Since He is on Bill Gates and Warren Buffet Cell

If Bill Gates and Warren Buffet frequently calls him then he is already influenced. Now he just has to find out more how he can get rid of the middle class jobs.

Of all the White House Briefings, Obama Conferences; I still have to hear somebody ask about Guest Foreign Worker Visas.

Harvard Group Think

Oh yes they are. He had NASSCOM meeting where they demanded more Visas and I know for a fact he's heard about this.

Also, Harvard these days seems to have "group think" of their entire economics department that somehow shipping U.S. jobs overseas and labor arbitraging Americans is "good" economics.

Boy, I wouldn't pay a dime for their "education" for they seemingly cannot read any data or statistics...
just spin out this "religion" not based on what is really happening economically.

Harvard Business School

They made a study in which - they made an assumption that if a person with a foreign sounding name (non caucasian sounding) that applied for a patent that he/she is a foreigner and not American. Hello, there are Chinese Americans and Indian Americans. One of the civil liberties group's should have sued them.
The other day there was this professor from Harvard on Lou Dobbs' show defending free trade. With the mess we are in and with millions of Americans unemployed; free trade is still the best for this professor. Maybe they don't teach common sense in Harvard.