Bring Your Questions for Outgoing White House Economist Keith Hennessey

Keith Hennessey

Keith Hennessey is the outgoing chief economic adviser to President Bush and director of the National Economic Council. When Obama takes office, Lawrence Summers will take his place.
“Our assumptions are that the economy will begin to recover early in the next president’s term,” Hennessey recently told CNBC, “but it’s too early to say exactly when.” (I can already hear the cynics among you: he’s just setting up his old boss as the real fixer and the new guy as the lucky inheritor.)
Hennessey held this job for just over a year; for the five years before that he was deputy director of the N.E.C. and spent the previous five years working for Trent Lott. He has also done governmental work in health economics and tax reform; early on, in the private sector, he worked on Symantec’s Q&A database program.
There are an awful lot of economic issues to consider these days — the estate tax and gas tax, the T.A.R.P. drawdown, oil prices — to say nothing of the broader recession and the stock-market miasma.
Feel free to ask Hennessey questions about all these subjects and more. I am guessing you will ask far more questions than he’s able to answer, but whatever the case, we will post his replies here in short order.
Addendum: Hennessey answers your questions here.