US President Barack Obama said on Friday the economy was showing “glimmers of hope” despite continuing stresses, and he signaled more steps to brighten the business climate.
Obama commented to reporters after meeting at the White House with members of his economic team, including US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, economic adviser Larry Summers and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
“What we’re starting to see is glimmers of hope across the economy,” the president said, although he added that the economy was “still under severe stress.”
“Whatever we do ultimately has to translate into economic growth and jobs,” Obama said.
He spoke a day after the release of encouraging trade and jobless figures pushed stocks higher, and Summers predicted the economy would emerge from a sense of “freefall” by the middle of the year.
Obama said there has been a significant uptick in the number of home owners seeking to refinance their mortgages, which will put money back into their pockets. He said a 20 percent increase last month in the Small Business Administration’s largest program means that small companies, often prized as the backbone of the economy, “are starting to get money.”
But Obama also pointed to the high unemployment rate — which climbed to a 25-year high of 8.5 percent last month — and acknowledged that “we’ve still got a lot of work to do.”
“We’re starting to see progress,” he said. “And if we stick with it, if we don’t flinch in the face of some difficulties, then I feel absolutely convinced that we are going to get this economy back on track.”
Obama made no mention of “stress tests” being conducted at 19 major US banks. The results, due at the end of this month, are anxiously awaited by the financial markets.
The White House said Obama was to receive a status report on those appraisals on Friday. Attempting to assess banks’ capital needs, the government is testing how they would fare under more adverse economic conditions than are expected.
Mindful of market sensitivity, the US Treasury Department is asking banks not to talk about the stress tests as part of their first-quarter earnings results, a source familiar with government discussions said.
Asked whether banks were being told to be silent, Obama adviser Austan Goolsbee told Fox Business Network: “You ought to wait until the proper announcement time of all the bank examinations together, rather than have individual banks come running forward revealing their individual information alone.”
Obama did say, however, that he and his advisers discussed a program to use public-private sector investment funds to help banks clear their books of toxic assets.
He also voiced confidence that his administration was addressing problems in both the troubled banking system as well as non-bank financial institutions, a sector that escaped adequate regulatory scrutiny before the latest crisis.
Also at the meeting were Christina Romer, who heads the White House Council of Economic Advisers; Sheila Bair, chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp; Securities and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary Schapiro; and Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan.
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
Prices of gasoline and diesel products at domestic gas stations are to fall NT$0.2 and NT$0.1 per liter respectively this week, even though international crude oil prices rose last week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said yesterday. International crude oil prices continued rising last week, as the US Energy Information Administration reported a larger-than-expected drop in US commercial crude oil inventories, CPC said in a statement. Based on the company’s floating oil price formula, the cost of crude oil rose 2.38 percent last week from a week earlier, it said. News that US President Donald Trump plans a “secondary
RSS