From here. He says it’s the worst crisis of his career.
Is Greenspan overstating, understating, or nailing the extent of the problem?
Starting with the dot-com crash, Bush has never tried to do much of anything to fix the issue besides borrowing money to pay it off in the hopes that the economy would pick itself up and go right. But with all the military spending leaching money out of the system and the mortgage crisis, the odds of that happening certainly doesn’t look good, and has thrown the government and a lot of banks in the hole. So now there isn’t really anyone to bail the boat.
I don’t think things will get even as bad as they were following 9/11, but I could see things going into a good decade of general sluggishness unless the government finally makes economic instead of quasi-economic but actually political idealism-based decisions.
Pulling money out of the economy certainly isn’t the way to better it, but cutting taxes while spending government funds on non-economy building projects like a drunken sailor also isn’t the path. Clinton essentially just sat back and let the world do its thing, which is frankly probably the best thing to do given the two paths otherwise usually taken, but I suspect that wiser and more beneficial things could actually be done than that. I’ve not much confidence that either Obama or McCain would do any of those though. Hillary, perhaps as I never trusted that she had much underlying idealism. I’d rather the person who would bow to reality, but is sort of slimey, than the person who has faith in their beliefs and is honest–but wrong.
So wrong. To wage an expensive war with tax cuts. We have had a lot of wars. All the other presidents thought better. But Bush and his neocons decided to go this route. It was dangerous and he did not escape. It was close but the repubs own this mess.
We have been in recession a long time. There have been technical definitions which they have used to pretend it isn’t one. But it has been in one a long time.
What pisses me off is Greenspan was neck deep in causing it. When he was inside he took orders and did the wrong thing. After he leaves he feels he can criticize. He hinted several times that he was uncomfortable with the financial status. Yet he did not have the clockweights to stand up.
Enter? Every day we get more bad financial news. And way too many people in this country are ready for 4 more years of fiscal irresponsibility and Republican cronyism as if they haven’t ruined nearly every fucking thing in this country.
It makes me feel sick.
Ditto on the recession thing. Some have tried to spin it to appear that we are not technically in a recession, but it’s obvious we’ve been in one for quite some time. Greenspan went from Da Man to Da Problem quite some time ago.
I don’t buy the Republican party line that the president has little control over the economy.
If the economy were a hot air balloon, Dubya basically clawed a bunch of holes in it with his retarded tax cuts and damn fool wars. He was able to jettison some sandbags to keep it aloft by actions that led to the mortgage crisis. (The federal govt oversees the rules and there were plenty of intelligent men who knew bad lending was going on, yet his administration did nothing and did not enact legislation to stop the foolish mortgage giveaways because they believed the housing market was the savior of the economy)
Add to that the absent energy policy that allowed gas prices to cause inflation and our massive trade deficits and I am amazed Dubya had not run out of ballast earlier. He hasn’t been patching the rips. I have to believe he’s run out of sandbags to jettison and maybe he’s moving on to cargo and passengers.
Hillary would’ve been an ace engineer, but lacked the charisma to charm the voters, who only seem to care about emotionally connecting to a President. Honestly, I don’t care how charming my engineers are, I just want them to be able to fix the problems. IMHO, Hillary had loads of positive real-life experience in this regard.
Obama might work, since he has some intelligence, but it’s like hiring someone fresh out of college, instead of an experienced veteran.
McCain is probably less proficient than Obama, and lately, it seems there is a real danger he would do the same feces-flinging monkey rampage damage to our limping economy that the current President is doing.
His economic adviser is Gramm. That is all you need to know.
Devil’s advocate: aren’t “technical definitions” all we have? If you’re going to say that all the definitions economists actually use are wrong, what do you propose to replace them with, other than “whenever it feels like we’re in one” or just listing whatever current conditions you can think of?
Why do people suddenly think that Hillary could have done a good job managing the economy? Where did this come from?
Am I the only person who remembers her lending her own campaign money multiple times and then having Obama help to bail her out of her final debt?
I didn’t say that she was good at managing money. (And betting on yourself in a race isn’t really an issue of poor money management.) I said that I don’t think she’s an idealist, so she would be willing to listen to people who are good at managing money (i.e. real economists.)
I’ll gasp in glee the day you find someone good at everything, but there’s plenty of people who will listen to wiser heads when a crunch comes on, assuming that they’re in a position to be able to do so. True believers aren’t in that group though.
You’re right…the president himself doesn’t single-handedly fix anything. It’s all about committees and cabinets and advisors. I trust that he’ll surround himself with people who know this stuff. The first step is admitting you have a problem. Then you collect the advisors who can put it back on track.
I heard yesterday (on one of the gajillion programs about this) that it is going to probably hurt for all of 2009 before we see things begin to turn around. 
“Recession” is a technical term, and by using it you’re falling into a trap. All it takes is a hiccup upwards, and those who should be taking action will instead be able to point to said hiccup and declare that you are obviously just a Chicken Little.
-Joe