Bush meets IT leaders

The president elect hashed out his economic agenda and formulated relevant strategies, given the current economic climate, focusing on issues important to the IT sector, including education, free trade and regulatory relief.

Attending his economic forum late yesterday, the finale of a two day conference, were representatives of 15 leaders of mainly blue-chip firms including Michael Dell of Dell Computers, Craig Barrett of Intel Corporation, John Chambers of Cisco Systems, Carly Fiorina of Hewlett Packard, Lou Gerstner of IBM and Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems.

The bursting of the internet stock bubble, which has dragged down stock markets globally after an unprecedented eight years of growth under outgoing President Clinton, was shored up by the shock announcement of the U.S. Federal Reserve with a 0.5 percentage point cut in a key interest rates.