Geithner bored by complaints from business about Obama policies

An estimated $2 trillion in private capital is sitting on the sidelines, as many say businesses are afraid to commit resources to expansion and job creation in such an environment. Others say the reason that businesses aren’t spending and banks aren’t lending is that there is a shortage of consumer demand.

Geithner contested the idea that the health and financial regulation bills have made it more difficult for businesses to plan for the future.

“The basic framework is set. And that should help again give people a lot of clarity about what the basic rules they’re going to operate under is,” he said. “But of course there’s a lot of rule-writing design, and there should be. A lot of the existing set of rules, muck of rules, were not any good. And so you want people to go back and revise and reform.”

Shelby, however, saw the bill quite differently.

“Despite our repeated warnings, the Democrats neglected to determine the exact causes of the crisis so that they could make clear choices in the best interests of the economy. Instead, they gave failed regulators more power and created new bureaucracies to whom they delegated much of the critical decision making,” he said.

But Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Wednesday said in congressional testimony that “the economic outlook remains unusually uncertain,” which sent the stock market reeling.

“Firms making long-term commitments, whether it’s to employment or capacity expansion or new business lines, obviously are concerned about the environment and about uncertainty,” Bernanke said. “Firms are holding a lot of cash. That’s true. It’s also true they’re not hiring very much. On the other hand, their investment in equipment and software has been pretty robust. So there are some mixed signals there … I’m sure there’s some effect there, and I think it’s important. We don’t need to measure the effects to take the lesson that whatever we can do to reduce uncertainty would be productive.”

Ted Truman, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who advised Geithner at Treasury for a few months after Obama took office, called Bernanke’s comments “remarkable.”

“There’s always uncertainty,” Truman said in an interview. “Are they more uncertain today than they were six months ago or 12 months ago? Things are more certain today.”

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