By: Jeff Sanford

One of the first matters of business for the new president-elect Barack Obama will be to successfully insert himself into discussions about how to deal with the dramatically weakening U.S. economy.

According to The Washington Post this morning, one of the first orders of business on that front will be his attendance at the economic summit President Bush set up for November 15 in Washington, D.C. A short piece on this so-called “Bretton Woods II” meeting ran in the latest issue of the print version of Canadian Business, which isn’t up online yet.

In the CB piece I talked to Sebastian Mallaby, director of the Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. One of the interesting things he pointed out (but which we couldn’t fit into the print piece) was that, assuming Obama won the election, this meeting would represent the first face-to-face between the Chinese government and the incoming administration. Talk about historic.

For this reason alone the meeting will be interesting. But don’t get your hopes up that much will accomplished on the 15th. As the print story in CB points out, the big issue is the unnaturally low peg of the Chinese yuan to the U.S. dollar. But according to Mallaby–who has talked to people in the Obama camp–the incoming administration is unlikely to broach the idea of the need for currency revaluation with the Chinese administration at this meeting. That just wouldn’t be polite. Rather, this meeting will be about getting to know one another, setting the grounds for further talk, and getting in place a process for moving towards a possible Bretton Woods II agreement much further down the road. “I don’t think Obama’s people will want to spring that in this meeting. I don’t think this issue is quite ripe,” said Mallaby. “I think we’ll see some common principals come out of it. The good thing: It is the beginning of a process.”