President-Elect Barack Obama's just annouced his new economic team this morning : New York Federal Reserve head Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary, UC Berkeley Professor Christine Rohmer as chair of his Council of Economic Advisers, and former Harvard President Lawrence Summers as head of National Economic Council.
Geithner and Summers have been much-talked about. Summers, even with his mistatements on women, is considered a bright and effective economic policy-maker. Geithner is so well respected on Wall Street that the Dow jumped 200 points after Friday's news leak of his selection as Treasury Secretary.
The surprise is Christine Rohmer, who's well-known in the San Francisco Bay Area as a professor of Economics at Cal-Berkeley. I personally met Professor Rohmer during my second year as a graduate student at UC Berkeley. I found her to be a delightful mix of the personable and the intellectual. A great mix to advance policy points and ideas. On that, Dr. Rohmer was well-regarded and popular with students, and I think if memory serves, won an award for teaching. The point is she can take complex economic matters and explain them in such a way that people can learn them.
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