Obama: Costly stimulus needed to jolt economy

Obama: Costly stimulus needed to jolt economy


Presentation of Economic team.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - President-elect Barack Obama promised on Monday to jolt the faltering U.S. economy with a costly stimulus package next year and introduced the team that will help him navigate the global financial crisis.
Obama, who warned again that the economy would likely get worse before it got better, declined to put a price tag on the two-year stimulus proposal which other Democrats have estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars.
Obama said his team was already working on the details of a package to save or create 2.5 million jobs and urged the next Congress to act on it immediately in early January.
Timothy Geithner, 47, president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, will become Treasury secretary, and Lawrence Summers, 53, a former Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, will be director of the National Economic Council.
President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Christina Romer, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, as the head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.