Amid rising public impatience with an economy now under his watch, US President Barack Obama on Tuesday said his administration needs to push money out faster to initiate a recovery.
He also conceded that unemployment would rise above 10 percent.
“People are going through a very tough time right now,” Obama said at a White House news conference. “And I don’t expect them to be satisfied.”
For the second time in a month, Obama voiced unease over the results of a US$787 billion economic stimulus that he pressed Congress to pass as one of his first acts as president.
New polls indicate that the still-popular president faces some erosion of support over his economic policies. Other polls show Americans are more upbeat than last year but still wary of spending, a sign of uncertainty and a prescription for a slow recovery.
Obama’s lowered expectations for employment served to prepare the public for more economic bad news even as the economy shows signs that the worst of the recession is over. Unemployment typically continues to rise even as an economy begins to recover.
Asked for his assessment of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Obama said he has performed “a fine job under very difficult circumstances.”
The Fed has worked closely with the administration to inject money into the struggling financial sector and to ease the credit crunch.
Bernanke’s term ends on Jan. 30 and speculation about his replacement has centered on Lawrence Summers, Obama’s top economic adviser and former Harvard president.
Asked whether he would keep him on the job, Obama demurred.
“I’m not going to make news about Ben Bernanke,” he said.
Obama said the Fed had done better than other government agencies in regulating the financial sector leading up to the Wall Street crisis, but he faulted the Fed for not anticipating the risks that contributed to the meltdown last fall.
“They didn’t do everything that needed to be done,” he said.
Republicans pounced on the president’s economic message, with House Republican leader John Boehner noting that nearly 3 million jobs have been lost this year.
“The president did not lay out a clear path for how his administration will keep its promise to create jobs for middle-class families and small businesses,” he said.
In January, Obama’s economic team predicted unemployment would rise no higher than 8 percent with the help of US$787 billion in new government spending.
The unemployment rate last month reached a 25-year high of 9.4 percent. Obama aides have said that the economy took a turn for the worse since their initial forecast.
“At that point, nobody understood what the depths of this recession were going to look like,” Obama said. “If you recall, it was only significantly later that we suddenly get a report that the economy had tanked. And so it’s not surprising, then, that we missed the mark in terms of our estimates of where unemployment would go.”
Obama said that “it’s pretty clear now that unemployment will end up going over 10 percent.”
He said it was not yet time to decide whether the country needed a second stimulus to the economy.
“It’s important to see how the economy evolves and how effective the first stimulus is,” he said.
But he said his administration needed to increase the pace with which it is spending the US$787 billion that Congress approved at the start of his presidency.
“We’ve got to get our Recovery Act money out faster,” he said. “We’ve got to make sure that the programs that we put in place are working the way they’re supposed to.”
Taiwan aims to open 18 representative offices and seven Taiwan Tourism Information Centers worldwide by next year to attract international visitors, the Tourism Administration said on Saturday. The agency has so far opened three representative offices abroad this year and would open two more before the end of the year, it said. It has also already opened information centers in Jakarta, Mumbai and Paris, and is to open one in Vancouver next month and in Manila in December, it said. Next year, it would also open offices in Amsterdam, Dubai and Sydney, it added. While the Cabinet did not mention international tourists in its
EYES AT SEA: Many marine enthusiasts have expressed interest in volunteering for coastal patrols, which would help identify stowaways and illegal fishing, the CGA said Six thousand coastal patrol volunteers are to be recruited for 159 inspection offices to enhance the nation’s response to “gray zone” conflicts, Coast Guard Administration (CGA) sources said yesterday. Volunteer teams would be established to increase the resilience of coastal defense systems in the wake of two unlawful entries attempted by Chinese over the past three months, Ocean Affairs Council Minister Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) said. A former Chinese navy captain drove a motorboat into the Tamsui River (淡水河) in Taipei on the eve of the Dragon Boat Festival in June, while another Chinese man sailed in a rubber boat into the Houkeng
NEXT LEVEL: The defense ministry confirmed that a video released last month featured personnel piloting new FPV drone systems being developed by the Armaments Bureau Taipei and Washington are pushing for their drone companies to work together to establish a China-free supply chain, the Financial Times reported on Friday. A delegation of high-level executives and US government officials were yesterday to arrive in Taipei to discuss with their Taiwanese counterparts collaboration on drone technology procurement and development, the report said. The executives represent 26 US manufacturers of drone and counter-drone systems, while the officials are from the US Department of Commerce and the US Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit, along with Dev Shenoy, principal director for microelectronics in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense
‘ANONYMOUS 64’: A national security official said that it is an attempt by China to increase domestic anti-Taiwanese sentiment and inflame cross-strait tensions The Ministry of National Defense’s (MND) Information, Communications and Electronic Force Command (ICEFCOM) yesterday denied accusations by China that it had undermined regional security by carrying out cyberattacks against targets in China, adding instead that Beijing was responsible for raising tensions and undermining regional peace. The Chinese Ministry of State Security on WeChat accused a hacker group called “Anonymous 64” of targeting China, Hong Kong and Macau starting earlier this year through frequent cyberattacks. The group carried out cyberattacks to seize control of Web sites, outdoor electronic billboards and video-on-demand platforms in China, Hong Kong and Macau, it said, adding the hackers’