Obama to announce economy team

US president-elect Obama will today announce the team he is to call on to save the US economy from recession, and implement one of the most ambitious public spending programmes since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

At a press conference in Chicago with his future vice-president, Joe Biden, Obama will announce that Tim Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York , will become his treasury secretary, while Larry Summers, who was Bill Clinton's, will be Obama's economics adviser.

Yesterday, Obama's transition team said the president-elect wanted Congress to have a two-year economic plan of spending and tax cuts ready for him to enact into law when he becomes president on January 20.

Obama's 'new deal' will involve a nationwide programme of road-building, sewage systems and other public works which it is hoped will save or create 2.5m jobs by 2010, and which some analysts say will cost $700m.