No love lost: Corporate America’s complaints about the president keep getting louder
SPECULATION that Barack Obama will appoint a businessman to a senior job in his administration reached fever pitch this week, after the White House announced that Larry Summers, the president’s principal economic adviser, will soon step down. It is hard to find an American boss nowadays with a good word to say about the current administration, and the absence of anyone with a business background in Mr Obama’s inner circle is invariably mentioned as a reason why. The perception in corporate America that the president is actively anti-business, or at the very least doesn’t “get it”, has started to “have a psychological effect on how firms invest”, notes one well-informed insider, who used to see this as a “seven out of ten problem” but now rates it as a ten.