@ The White House
In the morning, the President and the Vice President will receive the Presidential Daily Briefing and the President will meet with senior advisors in the Oval Office.
Later in the morning, the President will meet with the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness in the State Dining Room. There will be a pool spray for the President?s remarks at the top of the meeting. The entire meeting will be streamed online at whitehouse.gov/live.
Following this meeting, the President will have lunch with the Vice President in the Private Dining Room. In the afternoon, the President will host King Abdullah II of Jordan at the White House.
Later in the afternoon, the President and the First Lady will welcome the 2011 World Series Champion St. Louis Cardinals to the White House to honor the team and their 2011 World Series victory. The President and First Lady will also recognize the efforts by the Cardinals to give back to their community as part of their visit, continuing the tradition begun by President Obama of honoring sports teams for their efforts on and off the field. This event in the East Room is open press. Later, the President and the Vice President will meet with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in the Oval Office.
@ Wall Street
Wall Street will deal for the first time with S&P downgrades around Europe. In certain respects, S&P's sovereign credit ratings have shadowed recent broader, longer term trends in the relative rising borrowing costs for euro sovereigns themselves over the last two years with respect to Germany, as well as partially reversing the generally upward trend in euro sovereigns' ratings in the first five years of the euro's existence.
In absolute terms, borrowing costs have only mattered for Italy and Spain outside the three bailout countries. On both counts, convergence closer to Germany's AAA sovereign rating and borrowing costs in the initial seven-year euro period went too far, ignoring underlying individual sovereign credit risk differences as part of the "Great European Convergence Investment Play", and over-estimating the Eurozone's institutional arrangements to secure the full functions of a central bank as lender of last resort. S&P's rating actions have nevertheless served as a clarion call to accelerate policy measures for a more cohesive "fiscal compact" agreed in outline at the last EU summit.
France's President Nicolas Sarkozy may ultimately have the most to lose, going into a presidential election in May, and with a weaker hand to play vis-a-vis Germany in euro governance negotiations after its loss of prestige.
