Obama to Name New Economic Recovery Team

One thing is for sure, the Obama White House is not going to be hurting for economic advisers.

Politico reports that at his third press conference in as many days in Chicago today, President-elect Barack Obama is expected to announce the creation of a new economic recovery advisory board, to be headed by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker.

The officials said the idea came from Obama, who wanted to preserve the advisory structure he had come to appreciate over the course of the campaign. The new body also reflects the magnitude of the nation’s economic problems, which Obama wants to solve in an integrated way – not just through attention to markets, but also to jobs, wages and housing foreclosure.

The economic recovery board’s staff director and chief economist will be Austan Goolsbee, who was senior economic adviser to the Obama campaign and will also be a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

The other board members – eight to 16 people of a caliber of Eric E. Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google Inc. – will be named later.

The board initially will exist for two years, but might well be extended for longer. Transition advisers expect it might meet roughly once a month.

With Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; National Economic Council Director Larry Summers; the three-person White House Council of Economic Advisers, headed by Berkeley economics professor Christina Romer; Domestic Policy Council Director Melody Barnes; and now this huge new team, Obama will have no shortage of brainpower to turn to for economic advice.

The new president may prove once and for all whether surrounding himself with an army of eggheads is an effective strategy for solving the nation’s toughest problems, or if it makes decision-making that much more difficult.