In July 2008, in a memorandum for the Obama campaign team and later published in Challenge,  I wrote as follows:

If the above analysis is correct, the political capital of the new presidency risks being depleted, quite quickly, in a series of short-term stimulus efforts that will do little more than buoy the economy for a few months each. Since they will not lead to a revival of private credit, every one of those efforts will ultimately be seen as “too little, too late” and therefore as ending in failure.

At this year’s Jackson Hole conference for central bankers, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke admitted that the economic recovery so far this year has been “somewhat less vigorous than we expected,” but he expressed hope that the economy would return to a more satisfactory growth rate next year.  Considering that the Fed was already projecting a markedly slower recovery than America experienced after previous deep recessions, the Fed’s economic objectives are far too modest.  Ideally, the US economy should be growing at a 5 percent rate in 2010 and 2011 to recover lost ground and get work

Speaking this past week at the Ex-Im Bank, President Obama laid out his strategy for doubling American exports within five years, a goal he announced in his State of the Union Address. Naming it the National Export Initiative, he described the strategy as “an ambitious effort to marshal the full resources of the United States government behind American businesses that sell their goods and services abroad.” The Initiative calls for the creation of an Export Promotion Cabinet, made up of the Secretaries of State, Treasury, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor along with the United State

Green investment is a major pillar of the president's economic recovery plan.  Yet, America's dependence on foreign countries to produce green technologies may undermine this recovery strategy.  Using a list of green goods derived from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), we have determined that the United States ran an overall green trade deficit of -$8.9 billion in 2008, including a deficit of -$6.4 billion in the critical category of renewable energy, one of the main targets of the Obama administration's green agenda.  The U.S. economy also suffered a significant deficit in the pollution management category.  On the positive side, the United States ran modest surpluses in two categories--energy efficiency and a grouping of other environmental goods related to water purification and sustainable agriculture.