Please Mr President

Our Americas correspondent regresses to a time of infant innocence, and composes a Christmas list addressed to Barack Obama

Dear President-Elect Obama:

I’m just writing up my annual Christmas wish list to Santa Claus and I thought that while I was doing that I might as well write to you, too.
 
Don’t worry. I’m asking Santa for the usual –peace on earth and goodwill towards men. I figure you won’t be able to supply that straight away unless you really are as miraculous as your campaign team has portrayed.

But there are other wishes I have of a financial nature that I think you can influence during your first 100 days as president of the United States. So, here they are:

Please find a way to stimulate the stock and bond markets so that my Individual Retirement Accounts (IRA) and college funds and those of my family and friends have some kind of value when we need them.
 
It will help if, as predicted, the Dow Jones Average increases 6 percent just because it’s your first year of a new presidency. However, since the stock market has fallen 35 percent since last autumn, more will be needed. Some pundits are requesting an economic stimulus package in the form of your promised tax cut for all middle-class people who each earn less than $250,000 per year. That’s a start. But helping hard-pressed homeowners and changing personal bankruptcy laws would help, too.

Aside from the $700 billion (some say $1 trillion or more) to bail out the banks from their financial follies, please could you spare some change for the auto industry which is in a severe recession? This could be in the form of low-interest or interest-free loans.

While you’re at it, if it’s important to find jobs and stimulate the U.S. economy, would it be possible to use government funds to rebuild the desolate areas around New Orleans and other parts of Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas who have been devastated by Hurricanes Katrina, Gustav and Ike? Surely that would kill two birds with one stone.

Please also find a way to keep energy costs down at least to the levels they reached just before the election when gas was less than $2.00 a gallon compared to $4.00 per gallon only three months before. I’m not a drilling fan, but any initiative that would enhance energy conservation and promote renewable energy would be appreciated.

Last, but certainly not least, please crack down on the severely inadequate federal financial regulation that got the world into this economic mess. You allegedly promised to streamline the alphabet soup of agencies, from the Federal Reserve to the Securities and Exchange Commission which would be a start.

Whatever you do, Mr. President-Elect, please appoint regulators who understand the financial instruments that they are supposedly policing. There also should be regulatory restrictions on excessive trading, be it of derivatives or stocks or catastrophe bonds or whatever other new instruments are currently being developed. None of these transactions should be hidden off-balance sheet so that shareholders have no idea of their company’s true value.

I look forward to some of my wishes coming true in 2009.