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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (476494)	4/29/2009 8:24:25 PM
From: bentway	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1573857

Obama's Business Report Card Corporate leaders give President Obama and his team relatively good grades 100 days in, but the devil is in such details as card check and corporate taxes By Jane Sasseen businessweek.com How does the business community think President Barack Obama is doing? As he hits the 100-day mark, there's little doubt the new President is getting high marks overall for his 24/7 moves to revive the economy. And the favorable sentiment on Obama's job performance reflected in many public polls is also mirrored in the views of many business executives. "We're happy with the general outlines of what he's done; things are starting to take hold," says John J. Castellani, the president of the Business Roundtable. Castellani says he's been impressed with the "intensity" of the Administration's focus. "They're working very hard to get things moving forward." Much of that obviously rests on the speed and aggressiveness with which the President pushed forward his massive, nearly $800 billion stimulus bill. While most of the money is just now starting to flow—and complaints that it is trickling out too slowly are on the rise—many businesses are nevertheless starting to see orders come in—and jobs saved—that otherwise would not have existed. While the Administration's performance in sorting out the mess in the financial sector has been shakier, many executives nevertheless give the Administration and the Federal Reserve credit for rolling out a host of measures aimed at helping struggling homeowners, reviving the moribund banking system, and thawing the frozen credit markets. With mortgage rates down sharply, lending expanding, investors lining up to join in the Treasury's subsidized efforts to clean up the banks' toxic mortgage assets, and interest rate spreads moving back to more normal levels, there is a palpable sense of relief in executive suites—as well as in the markets—that the worst of the crisis may be over. Support from Buffett and Unions Still, when it comes to the broader agenda of the business community, the picture is considerably more mixed. In part, points out Jack Quinn, a former top Clinton Administration official who now heads the lobbying firm Quinn Gillespie & Associates, that's a reflection of the fact that the business community is hardly monolithic—or hardly has monolithic interests. On controversial issues such as instituting a cap-and-trade regime to control harmful carbon emissions, many alternative energy companies back it wholeheartedly. No surprise: They stand to make a bundle. But traditional coal utilities and intensive energy users are much more skeptical about any aggressive adoption of such a system. They fear it will raise costs and make them uncompetitive. More important, Obama entered office as something of a question mark to many in business. On one hand, he had far greater support from business leaders, including the likes of Warren Buffet and Google's (GOOG) Eric Schmidt, than Democrats traditionally gain. At the same time, many business leaders worried about the anti-trade, and often anti-corporate, rhetoric that permeated the campaign. The massive role labor unions played in helping get Obama and congressional Democrats elected also raised fears of a sharp pro-labor tilt. Now, with a little more than three months under his belt, the President has dispelled some of those doubts, but not all. Despite the overall favorable grade Castellani gives the Administration, he adds: "There are still some things that remain troubling." <more>