By Maxine Shapiro, KERA 90.1 business commentator
Dallas, TX – It's Friday so "It's Only Money," a review of the big and not-so-big stories of the week. I'm Maxine Shapiro with KERA Marketplace Midday.
Where to begin? Without any of the normal leaks and warnings, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill resigned this morning. Larry Lindsey, the White House's top economic adviser, is also packing up and heading home. This was not an unanticipated move - just the timing was unexpected.
Politics is politics and O'Neill didn't want to play the game. He was anything but the "steady hand" that President Bush thought he would be. Bloomberg News reports early in his twenty-three month tenure, O'Neill told a German newspaper that the U.S. didn't follow a strong dollar policy. Then he "suggested that Bush's tax cut would not boost the economy as much as the White House calculated." And oh, how he loved to offend Wall Street. He told traders he could learn their jobs in a few weeks. Back in 2001, after the Dow had its largest decline in eleven years, he consoled investors by saying, "Markets go up and markets go down." The funny thing is, he might have been right on all accounts. I think anybody could have handled the rhetoric if there were some substantive alternatives made. You got the feeling he just sat on his hands talking.
And it was just four weeks ago that SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt was also asked to step down, followed by William Webster, chief of the new federal accounting oversight board. One question: who's minding the store? I highly suggest that Bush take some of that determination to go to war with Iraq and focus it on the economic concerns at home.
The November unemployment was the worst in seven months. We're back up to 6% unemployment. And instead of adding the 35-thousand jobs that economists had predicted, we lost 40-thousand jobs last month.
But it's the holidays, and we're not losing our optimism now. A recent survey says almost 34.5% of you will spend $500 or more on gifts this year. The rest of us will be spending less.
And a little fact I was surprised by read: since the deregulation of the airline industry in 1978, 130 airlines have filed for bankruptcy. For KERA Marketplace Midday, I'm Maxine Shapiro.
Marketplace Midday Reports air on KERA 90.1 Monday - Friday at 1:04 p.m. To contact Maxine Shapiro, please send emails to mshapiro@kera.org.