Reply #9: Obama economic aide Farrell stepping down [View All]

[ozymandius]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House said on Monday that Diana Farrell would step down as a deputy director of President Barack Obama's National Economic Council, marking the latest Obama administration staff departure.

Farrell, who will leave within weeks, works alongside council Director Larry Summers, who has already announced his intention to return to Harvard University at the end of 2010.

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Who is Diana Farrell?

An advocate of offshoring and innovation to produce economic growth, Farrell joined President Barack Obama’s administration as he fought to restore confidence in the credit markets and save financial institutions on the brink of destruction. more

Does she put lipstick on pigs?

In op-eds and other published writings, Farrell has written extensively on the subject of companies moving jobs overseas in pursuit of cheaper labor. In a book titled “The Economists' Voice: Top Economists Take on Today's Problems,” Farrell wrote a chapter titled “U.S. Offshoring: Small Steps to make it Win-Win.”

And what about "too big to fail" companies like AIG and Citigroup? Should they be broken into smaller companies that would not pose a danger to national and global financial stability?

Some argued that Congress should create measures that would prevent a company from growing too large.

But Farrell argues that the large, complex institutions, like AIG and Citigroup, have benefits as well. "We have created them, and we're sort of past that point, and I think that in some sense, the genie's out of the bottle and what we need to do is to manage them and to oversee them, as opposed to hark back to a time that we're unlikely to ever come back to or want to come back to," said Farrell.

I can't say that I will miss her and the Summers fella too.