Obama to name experts for economic panel

President Obama plans Friday to name business executives, academics and labor leaders to an advisory panel that will help guide his effort to rescue the economy and rebuild the shattered U.S. financial system.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker was tapped by Obama in November to lead the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which is modeled on a board created in the Eisenhower administration to advise the White House on intelligence matters.

Volcker is to join Obama for an 11:15 a.m. ET event to introduce the other 15 members of the economic panel.

According to the White House, the members will include Robert Wolf, chairman and chief executive of UBS (UBS) Group Americas, and Jim Owens, chairman and chief executive of Caterpillar Inc. (CAT, Fortune 500), and labor leaders such as Anna Burger, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union.

Penny Pritzker, chairman and founder of Pritzker Realty Group who was also the finance chair of Obama's presidential campaign, will sit on the board as will Laura D'Andrea Tyson, a former Clinton administration economist now at University of California, Berkeley.

The panel includes some officials who served Republican administrations, such as William Donaldson, who was SEC chairman under President George W. Bush and Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, who served in the Reagan administration.

The naming of the advisory board comes amid a slew of data showing soaring job losses and a deepening recession.

Economists are bracing for grim news when the Labor Department issues its January employment report at 8:30 a.m.

Analysts polled by Reuters predicted the data will show U.S. employers slashed another 525,000 workers from their payrolls after cutting 524,000 jobs in December.

Obama is prodding Congress to pass a more than $800 billion package of public works spending projects and tax cuts aimed lifting the economy out of recession.

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner plans Monday to unveil a plan to quell turmoil in the banking system and revive frozen credit markets.

Obama has also said one of his key priorities is overhauling a Wall Street regulatory structure whose laxity he believes helped to set the stage for the financial meltdown.

When he announced the idea of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board in November, Obama said its intent was to help him avoid "insular" government decision-making.

"The walls of the echo chamber can sometimes keep out fresh voices and new ways of thinking -- and those who serve in Washington don't always have a ground-level sense of which programs and policies are working for people, and which aren't," Obama said.

Volcker is among several high-profile players advising Obama on economic policy. The team also includes Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary who is now head of the National Economic Council, and current Treasury Secretary Geithner, who previously headed the New York Federal Reserve bank.

Another important aide is Christina Romer, chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and an expert on the Great Depression.

Obama relied heavily on Volcker for advice during the campaign. The 81-year-old former Fed chief gave the Democrat's presidential bid a boost last year with an early endorsement.

As Federal Reserve chairman from 1979 to 1987 under former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, Volcker was credited with breaking the back of double-digit inflation through interest-rate rises.

Austan Goolsbee, a longtime Obama adviser, is serving as staff director and chief economist for the economic advisory panel. Goolsbee is also a member of the Council of Economic Advisers.