Obama meets advisers, plans update on economy

[April 10, 2009]  WASHINGTON (AP) -- Fresh off a foreign trip heavily focused on global economic troubles, President Barack Obama is getting together with his top economic advisers as the U.S. recession shows signs of abating.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairwoman Sheila Bair were heading to the White House for a morning of talks Friday. Also attending were Securities and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary Schapiro and Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan.

Obama advisers say the broad agenda was to include discussions on efforts to stimulate the economy as well as stabilize the financial sector, plus the rising unemployment rate, mortgage refinancing and the health of banks, including "stress tests" the administration is conducting.

Last week's G-20 economic summit in London also was expected to be rehashed.

Obama returned Wednesday from his first overseas trip, an eight-day jaunt that included the meeting with leaders from the world's largest economies. After spending more than a week on foreign affairs, including his first visit to Iraq as commander in chief, Obama is refocusing his attention on the domestic crisis.

The backdrop of his White House meeting is a still-fragile economy that's showing signs of possible turnaround, including a strong profit forecast from Wells Fargo & Co., a drop in unemployment benefit filings and predictions of solid April sales from several retailers.

Also promising were less jittery stock investors, shoppers and home buyers, slowly thawing credit markets that were once frozen and stabilizing economic indicators that had been going from bad to worse.

All that has at least one Obama adviser sounding optimistic -- though cautiously so.

"There has been a substantial anecdotal flow over the last six to eight weeks of things that felt a little bit better," Obama's top economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, said Thursday.

"The sense of a ball falling off a table, which is what the economy has felt like since the middle of last fall, I think we can be reasonably confident that that is going to end within the next few months, and we will no longer have that sense of a free-fall," added Summers, the director of Obama's National Economic Council.

But Summers, who spoke at the Economic Club of Washington, said it was too soon to forecast how strong the rebound would be and when it would take hold. He also refused to predict how high the unemployment rate will rise before a sustainable recovery begins.

The government reported last week that the unemployment rate surged to a 25-year high of 8.5 percent in March. That followed a fourth quarter when the gross domestic product plunged at an annual rate of 6.3 percent, the biggest drop since 1982.

[Associated Press; By LIZ SIDOTI]

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