BINGO!
The article isn't really all that persuasive. I have listened to Obama talk about the crisis and he generally puts the problem into about the same focus as the writer of the article. Banking, mortgages, lack of regulation over exotic instruments, etc.
It is a bit dishonest to say that Obama hasn't come up with a plan to deal with the banking crisis. It is true that no comprehensive plan exists to deal with it, but that was true of the previous Administration as well, which threw money at the banks in TARP. Obama has done pretty much the same thing, only with a bit more grown up oversight. He has been in office only for a few weeks, and with numerous crises inherited from the Bungling Bushies, he has his hands full.
To criticize him for not fixing the banking problem, which took a long time to get where it is, is a bit much.
The problem is that the Federal Reserve and a dishonest Treasury Department came up with this stupid idea to throw billions and billions at the problem for their buddies instead of let them fail and other banks from picking up their pieces. They are throwing Capitalism over the cliff due to a small amount of greedy people, bad laws, and Government policies that allowed/forced too many people get mortgages that they could not afford. ACORN and their kind used the so-called subprime mortgages laws as a weapon to force banks to give unwise loans. They are creating a need for government to wipe your butt instead of doing it for yourself.
The issue isn't that he hasn't done a better job of dealing with the banking crisis. It's that the ONLY thing he has done is some wrangling on a bill that was already in progress. Now he's saying that the crisis we need to address next is healthcare. He also outlines a plan extending over 10 years.
Can you honestly say that a 10 year plan for healthcare is more critical than addressing the banking crisis? Any answer other than NO! is wrong. Period. The bizarre derivatives market has basically taken X dollars of debt and resold it MULTIPLE times. Taking what was a 10:1 expansion on deposited funds, and turning it into approximately a 30:1 ratio by selling it multiple times to totals in the neighborhood of $400 trillion dollars. The only way to real profit in any meaningful timeframe is basically institutionalized insurance fraud. AIG is taking a huge chunk of that hit, and we are pouring money in that black abyss. That abyss can swallow a good TEN YEARS of the united states GDP in one go. It's a bottomless pit, and priority
heh 14 out of 18 advisors are special interest...snicker .. kinda says it all
Rahm Emanuel: Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste, they are opportunities to do big things. (nytimes.com)
Hillary Clinton: 'Never waste a good crisis' (guardian.co.uk)
Obama Team keeps repeating: "never waste a good crisis" (in.reuters.com)
He started as a flim flam artist..and he remains one.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...Change your luck,Follow the little lady.
I do believe I am only going to comment on the concise descriptions from now on
no! YOU read the article!
Is name name calling necessary?
Next thing you know, he'll be talking about the Iraqi WMDs!
Not what you really meant, but rather than your stupid and shallow attack on Bush, it does make a point.
Bush walked on the public stage and told a bad/unsophisticated lie that was guaranteed to come home to roost. In that situation, EVERY president would have lied. They needed a public pretext. A better politician would have come up with a lie that could be spun better and not confronted with simple observation at a later date.
Obama has basically gotten on the public stage and threatened us all with the next coming of the great depression if he doesn't get his way on other issues. Trying to spin it like he ahs homed in on the heart of our financial crisis is just as dishonest as the claims of WMD that were false, and short term a more blatant falsehood than the WMD claims. Although I will give them credit, it is more spinnable long term.
Bush started the talk of the next Great Depression in his farewell tour in Dec/Jan. If you recall he said he turned away from his Free Market philosophy because some of his financial advisers told him that another Great Depression was coming if something drastic wasn't done. It seems likely that the time line for this conversation was last Fall, maybe as early as September. That is why Bush suddenly began asking for what later became TARP, and so on.
It seems obvious that some economists knew many months ago that this crisis was happening. It is totally disingenuous to blame the crisis on Obama, when it really began before the election, let alone when Obama took office on Jan 20th.
Obama is just trying to fix the problem that Bush helped to create. It is suicidal to hope he fails, because we will all be standing in soup lines if that happens.
See you aren't getting it. Heck, even I knoew this was coming years and years ago. What i didn't know was when. But it didn't take a genius to see that funding the economy by eternal house flipping without increaseing wages was the economic equivalent of perpetual motion.
Obama did not create the root problem. I'll argue every president since Nixon has contributed some critical piece to this problem. I'm certainly not blaming Obama for getting us here.
Obama is president, it is his job to lead the country through this problem to some sort of reasonable conclusion. He may or may not be capable of doing this, same as any other person who might have been in the office at this point and time.
However, he is badmouthing the economy and attempting to instill fear in order to push an agenda that at best doesn't fix a problem that is almost certain to get worse rapidly without something being done, and at worst accelerates and exacerbates this.
Lots of people want an idea of where things are going. They want a semblence of a plan. His answer is TARP 2 was signed, HEalthcare and ecobusiness is the crisis. LEts spend like a mofo, balls to the wall.
People are reacting to this, and that reaction is not something that will lead to an improved economy.
If ANYONE did this as president under the current conditions, they'd be just as wrong. The only pass Obama gets for being in office for only a short time so far is that he has not spent a lot of time on this course of action and can still stop before it is too late. He doesn't get an excuse, just the opportunity to change his course of action. But that is a limited time offer.
The most positive reaction is to invest in municple bonds that are tax free. Which avoids all the proposed taxes the president has SUGGESTED. However, part of the problem is that you have a bunch of dishonest bond raters too. This dishonest rating applies to municipal entities floating bonds as well. Stocks were working, we are now moving trillions of dollars from the stock market into improperly rated bonds in high volume, with no limitation on borrowing other than common sense and bond rating. Municipalities could incurr (and effectively already have) enough debt that their tax base won't be able to support simply servicing that debt, much less debt service plus existing services and infrastructure.
It is very much possible that any action that draws this recession out can accelerate some serious problems that WERE 15-20 years out to 4-6 years. If that occurs, we could indeed be looking at an economic downturn to exceed the great depression.
The president applying his personal ideology to helthcare right now and putting the economy on hold to accelerate that issue is about as irresonsible as you get. I hope Obama proves to have more sense and realizes the cost of persuing this agenda AT THIS TIME is not worth it. I'd say the samee if we had a radically conservative republican holding the econmy hostage to push a pro-life agenda in health care too.
raz-00
It's a short article, and worth a read, but I'll give you the cliffs notes version too.
1)Obama claims that the economic crisis is due to bad energy policy, a crisis in education, and a crisis in health care.
2)The economic problems are clearly a failure in the banking system.
3)Obama has done nothing to address any of the actual problems of the banking system.
4)Obama is using, and quite probably extending the economic crisis to further his ideological agenda with regard to the frist point.