Chrystia Freeland's Not Wild About Connell McShane or the Debt Ceiling Deal, in No Particular Order

Since today was her first appearance on this program, Imus asked Chrystia Freeland, the editor of Thomson Reuters Digital, the proper way to pronounce her name. “I don’t know how great your Slavic languages are,” she warned Imus, who can barely speak English.
 
Freeland, a Ukrainian born in Canada, has covered business and the economy for years, and got her start in the Soviet Union, where she was killing time before starting law school. “While I was there, the Soviet Union collapsed, and suddenly if you could write an English sentence you were in high demand as a journalist,” she explained.
 
I-Fave Matt Taibbi was there around the same time, and the two knew each other well, though they never dated. “I was engaged then,” said the mother of three, who inaccurately described herself today as “an elderly matron.”
 
Since she has the wisdom of years, Imus wondered what Freeland thought about the agreement to raise the debt limit. “It means that the United States has decided not to shoot itself—I won’t even say in the foot, because not reaching a deal would be more like shooting itself in the head,” she said. “But beyond that, I don’t think it means that much.”
 
Case in point: the markets actually went down yesterday, the day President Obama signed the bill into law. “The big concern of the markets hasn’t been the deficit—which is an issue, but I think a medium-term rather than a short-term issue,” said Freeland. “The really big concern of the markets is: when is this U.S. economy going to start growing again?”
 
She feels better about the markets’ performance today, with jobs numbers beating expectations, but Freeland is, overall, not terribly optimistic, particularly given the gloomy prediction made by former Obama economic adviser Larry Summers.
 
“He thinks there’s a one-in-three chance that the economy goes back into recession,” Freeland said, quoting form a piece Summers penned for the Reuters website. What’s more, Summers, now back at Harvard, also believes “we would be lucky” if unemployment is at 8.5 percent by 2012.
 
To Imus’s observation that Summers was wrong about a lot while in the White House, Freeland replied, “I think it’s hard to be fully candid when you’re in government. So I tend to trust economists much more when they are independent at a university.”
 
On the whole, Freeland thinks Republicans emerged victorious from the debt ceiling debate, if for no other reason than they got all the spending cuts they wanted with no new taxes. As for the Republicans hoping to take on Obama in 2012, Freeland noted the precarious situation facing Imus’s guy Mitt Romney.
 
“He is attractive to a lot of people,” she told Imus, particularly a lot of business people. “But as you know, he has to appeal to the Republican base as well. Walking that fine line, I think, is really tough for him, and it does mean he gets accused of being a flip-flopper.”
 
Working in Romney’s favor, of course, are his “manly good looks,” at least as far as Freeland is concerned. She agreed with Imus’s assessment that Obama’s not too shabby in that department either, but took a different tack on poor little Connell McShane.
 
“I’m an older lady!” she protested. “I think of him more as a son.”
 
 Thoughtfully, Imus observed, “There’s nothing wrong with riding down that cougar highway.”
 
-Julie Kanfer