Lila Shapiro
The Huffington Post
January 21, 2011
Early Friday morning, Obama announced a significant shift for the White House economic team: the war against Wall Street greed has lost a major player, and corporate America has gained an advocate.
General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt will be the new head of a Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. This panel will replace Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, formerly headed by Paul Volcker.
The two men have significantly different backgrounds. Immelt is a lifelong Republican and, as Bloomberg put it, “a corporate heavyweight who can help burnish Obama’s pro-business credentials.”
Volcker, a Democrat, was the creator of the eponymous rule in last year’s financial regulation bill which was designed to limit banks’ ability to use taxpayer-backed funds to make investments on their own behalf. In John Cassidy’s excellent New Yorker profile, he describes Volcker’s tenure in the White House as “a campaign to curb greed and speculation on Wall Street.”
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