The first 100 days of Obama’s presidency would have been a ho-hum item for most of the world that was mainly glad that Obama got elected and did not worry at all about how he well he would do in his first 100 days in office, were it not that the financial crisis is the defining challenge of Barack Obama’s presidency and the world knows it.

In an early signal of the issue’s importance, the president instituted the “economic daily briefing” — a meeting with top economic advisers in the Oval Office modeled after the daily national security briefings he receives.

What’s the big deal anyway about a newly-elected president’s first 100 days?

“It’s the journalistic equivalent of a Hallmark holiday," a senior US administration official said. "They don't mean anything but you have to observe them."

Last April 24, speaking at the G7 conference, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said that while there are encouraging signs of a turn-around, it is too early to say we have emerged from pressures on the global economy., or something to that effect.

“There is no doubt that times are still tough. By no means are we out of the woods just yet,” the president said in mid-April in an economic address at Georgetown University.

In recent weeks, the president has been striking a more hopeful, if cautious, tone on the economy, while advisers point to “green shoots” of progress: a surge in home refinancings, some loosening of credit, signs of resurgence in the retail sector.

Public anger reached a boil last month when news broke that the insurance company AIG paid $165 million in bonuses to the very financial division executives blamed for running the company into the ground. “I don’t want to quell anger; I think people have a right to be angry,” Obama said on March 19.

At an Oval Office meeting with CEOs of the nation’s top financial institutions, the president told top executives his administration was the only thing standing between them and “the pitchforks” of an angry public.

The president also has called for limits on executive pay; ordered the firing of General Motors chief Rick Wagoner as part of the restructuring of the auto industry; and taken credit card executives to task for raising interest rates and fees in the midst of a recession.

The president’s signature middle class tax cuts are just now getting into the system; the next few months will reveal whether they’ve worked to stimulate demand.

Billions in recovery act funds should start to flow into the economy.

And in the coming months, the US Treasury Department is likely to hold the first auctions to purchase banks’ bad assets.

The success — or failure — of that effort will be crucial and telling. All of these come close on the heels of a massive bail-out fund that included a $275 billion housing program estimated to rescue as many as 9 million homeowners from foreclosure as well as a proposal for major overhaul of the financial regulatory system.

All of these are welcome government interventions in the US macro-economy and the free market fundamentalists can turn in their graves or in their ivory tower swivel chairs as far as the suffering citizenry is concerned.

We do not need another round of disaster capitalism feeding on this disaster developed by greedy financial whiz kids and hands-off financial regulators.

Complicating this already complex situation is an imminent swine flu pandemic.

The World Health Organization has just raised its alert level but stopped short of declaring a global emergency.

The virus poses a potentially grave new threat to the U.S. economy, which was showing tentative early signs of a recovery.

A widespread outbreak could batter tourism, food and transportation industries, deepening the recession in the U.S. and possibly worldwide.

It is about time that economists forget the illusion that economics can be as scientific as physics and chemistry.

It is time that economists re-write their macro-economics to reflect the severe limitations of the free market and to revise their belief in the perfection of market economies on models that assume perfect information, perfect competition and perfect risk markets.

As Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz pointed out in his review of Naomi Klein’s blockbuster book “The Shock Doctrine” (m)arket fundamentalists never really appreciated the institutions required to make an economy function well, let alone the broader social fabric that civilizations require to prosper and flourish.