President-elect Barack Obama is due to meet the press shortly and make observations about, or even announce a course of action, regarding the state of the nation's economy. The press meet will come after a powwow with his high profile economic advisory group, a team that includes billionaire investor Warren Buffett, ex-commerce secretary William Daley and former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. The meet will come hard on the heels of a Labour Dept report just out that the US economy has lost 240,000 jobs in October and unemployment rate has now surged to its highest level in more than 14 years.

October is now the tenth consecutive month that the economy has shed jobs with the manufacturing and service sectors registering the highest losses.

If he is aware, then it is likely that Obama may be slightly cheered by the news that the West Indian island country of Antigua and Barbuda has announced that it is considering renaming the island's highest mountain peak, Boggy Peak, as Mount Obama.

This would not, however, divert his mind from the mountain of difficulties he needs to climb, the scale of which has not been experienced by the country since the 1930s.

Plunging employment numbers, a meltdown in the financial sector, a collapsed housing market, a shaky Wall Street coupled with somewhat longer-term, but equally pressing, challenges, as represented by health care and foreign energy supplies, all present a troubled view from the mountain top.

In their outlook, economists are near-unanimous that the US faces a deeper downturn before it manages to swing out of the lethal cocktail of economic worries and challenges that it is now faced with.

Given that there is going to be a gathering of world leaders for an economic summit in Washington, observers feel that it would make sense for Obama to announce his economic team before 15 November so that it can avail of the opportunity and indulge in some meaningful interactions with world leaders.

The view from the top
Obama has already asked for a second government stimulus package, worth $175 billion, that would set aside money for investments in infrastructure and also offer another round of rebate checks.

He has also promised to revamp regulations governing Wall Street, bring down health-care costs, ramp up indigenous energy sources and set caps on carbon dioxide emissions for big industries.

Obama aides say that he will not allow health care reform to be placed on the backburner and that he will try and press ahead with massive investments in renewable energy technology, as opposed to the Republican prescription of increased offshore oil drilling and use of nuclear power.

Resources, however, are limited and are being diverted to mitigate the financial crisis and finance wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The hard view on the problem faced by the president-elect is that energy independence and balancing the budget may not be possible and that it may already be too late to prevent the economy from slipping into recession. 

In his acceptance speech at Chicago's Grant Park, the soon to be 44th president of the United States had warned his countrymen that the "...road ahead would be long, the climb steep."