Obama's a globalist. Always has been. He'll tweak some agreements in our favor but he's a globalist. Every serious Democratic candidate was a globalist, even John Edwards. Obama hopefully realizes that part of being a globalist is to provide a better social safety net for those at home.

what a shame. but thanks for the heads up, steve.

one question: how many more spots are there left to fill on the team? are you aware of any plans to balance things out more? I have a vague recollection of Obama saying something along the lines of "I want a Robert Reich and an Alan Blinder in my administration," implying that he'd pick from folks from left and center-left and achieve some sort of balance.

Thanks for promoting the truth in advertising thing on a topic that couldn't have more import, for like, the entire world.

To some degree, Furman manifests the interests and perspective of perhaps the leading neoliberal force in politics today, Robert Rubin. Furman could make a good case that his views may differ here and there, but my sense is that he's an essential spear-carrier of Rubinomics.

thank you for "sensing" certain "manifest" interests and perspectives apparently shared by furman-rubin. they were, otherwise, difficult to discern.

They would be called "free traders" for the most part -- and because no free trade is really a free trade deal given the thousands of [amends & bilats attached to typical FTAs] it's fairly easy for each to say that they are on the side of working families and want to prevent the worst impacts from hitting the American middle classwhile in theory, they would prefer to see a genuine, frictionless free trade system in which efficiencies are created throughout the economic ecosystem.

who knew? furman, rubin, econoecolubricologists, greasing slippery rails for brakeless offshoring and unbridled outsourcing in an econoeco enviroeco econoviro ride to nowhere .

less clemons, more furman:

We are in the global economy. We are there to stay. The question is, do we have the right set of rules that allow American workers, American farmers, and American businesses, to compete and survive and thrive in a global economy, and that is where I would say we have really let down all those groups, companies that are on American soil, American workers, and American farmers, that we have between currency issues, tax issues, worker rights, environmental standards, even food safety, we have disadvantaged our own domestic producers in the name of free trade, the rhetoric of free trade, the ideology around that. I think one of the other key issues that we see that driven this change in the global economy is corporate global strategy, that multinational corporations have very deliberately engaged in the policy debate in a way to speed and exacerbate the impact of globalization on American workers, between the offshore outsourcing of American jobs and the role of the financial sector, the business community that provides the funding for manufacturing and for production, has almost created a rush for the exits where you can think of a government having different attitude toward the pressures of globalization.

One is to say if your company is encountering trouble competing in the global economy, here is the way to hurry up and move your production offshore so you can produce somewhere else and then not worry about how to compete while still paying American wages, abiding by American health and safety standards, environmental standards, and food product standards, just leave, and that seems to be what our government and our corporations have come together to agree is the consensus.

There is another way of addressing this question which is to say, what do we need to do to make it possible for American companies to produce on American soil, to do so profitably, and to thrive in that global economy? We need to make those conditions fair.

Some of the issues around the level playing field are a little bit clichéd, but they are not totally without some basis, that if you had a [current] tax system for example that rewards companies that move jobs offshore, even through our corporate tax system and I think this is one key piece of what we need to talk about today, we [should] tax our corporations with a direct profits tax. Most of our industrial competitors in the world tax corporations through a value-added tax or something like that which has a border-adjustable piece to it which means that they are actually rebating the tax paid by corporations at the border on exports and they are actually imposing another tax on imports that come in, so our producers are double disadvantaged in competition with most of our major competitors, and we need our government to address that issue, to be able to take that seriously, as well as the currency issues.

But calling a spade a spade, it's clear that Furman is no Dean Baker or Robert Blecker or Jared Bernstein -- all important economists who have been far more right as of late than the Rubin crowd in anticipating the stress points in globalization, the housing bubble, trade, and the like.

calling jokers wild, bloomberg news

So, congrats to Jason Furman on his new post -- but I am scratching my head wondering which direction Obama is really going?

yokota must have a fine high school but a college degree could alleviate pointless scratching, unless that is the point.

more bloomberg

Furman said the Obama campaign's economic goal, like the Hamilton Project's, is based on ``broadly shared, bottom-up growth.'' "You need to empower people to make the economy work for them,'' he said.

shorter clemons, always & forever: obama can't, clinton can.

Both Furman and Goolsbee are excellent, knowledgable economists who are much more likely to be governed by good economics than ideology.

The idea of trying to pigeon-hole their world-view is rather unfortunate, especially when it is clear that Obama is serious about gathering the opinions of a wide range of excellent thinkers. And why does Steve Clemons only address trade. There is a great deal to economic policy outside trade, I would argue the more important part as well.

Including all the names I have heard mentioned: Goolsbee, Furman, David Cutler, Jeff Liebman, and now Blinder, Summers, Rubin, Galbraith, and Jared Bernstein and you have a group of first rate thinkers and policy experts who at the very least are likely to avoid the brain-dead ideologically driven policies of the past 8 years. (I dare say there are several others whose important views will be solicited such as Stiglitz and Jim Heckman, who is very influential in policy toward early childhood investment.)

destor23 -- Of course Obama is a globalist. But there are different kinds of globalists. Some are manic globalists who still have in mind a network of higher and higher trust thoroughfares for the flow of money, people, capital and ideas -- and there is now a higher fear brand of globalization in which borders are thicker, people travel less frictionlessly through them, along with other changes. We are not going back to some nativist orientation -- but I do think that we are going to rethink globalization and how it works. Jamie Galbraith and Jared Bernstein have been creative and aggressive on that front. I think Summers has come to an 'introspective moment' as well but still carries the neoliberal flame. Blinder, in my view, has been the most important top tier economist in opening up this debate and moving many in his field. The group of economists listed are diverse -- I grant that, but that wasn't really the key focus of my piece regarding Jason's new job. In any case, thanks for the note.