President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board

The President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, originally the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB), was an ad hoc panel of non-governmental experts from business, labor, academia and elsewhere that President of the United States Barack Obama created on February 6, 2009. The board reported to Obama and his economic team on possible ways to improve the nation's economy. Obama announced this new board on November 26, 2008, and also announced that it would be chaired by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker with campaign economic adviser Austan Goolsbee as staff director and chief economist.

The council met a total of four times, with its final meeting on January 17, 2012. In 2013, the authorization for the council was not renewed, causing the council to be permanently shut down.

The board followed the model of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which President Dwight Eisenhower established in 1956. Like the PFIAB, the advisory board was meant to pierce what Obama called the "insularity" of Washington decision-making processes. In announcing the board, Obama commented that “The walls of the echo chamber can sometimes keep out fresh voices and new ways of thinking – and those who serve in Washington don't always have a ground-level sense of which programs and policies are working.”

The PERAB was intended to provide that ground-level sense, and Obama said that this mission was reflected in the board's diverse membership.Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate in economics and a noted progressive columnist, has argued that, given the centrist makeup of Obama's economic inner circle, the new board could be used to "give progressive economists a voice." He mentioned James K. Galbraith, Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, Dean Baker, and Jared Bernstein as progressive economists who might be suitable for the board. Bernstein, however, was subsequently named to a full-time administration position as chief economist and economic policy adviser to Vice President Joe Biden.

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