
Originally Posted by
BigLeRoy
I was nodding along, mostly agreeing with your post, until I got to your last statement. When Obama took over, in late January 2009, the entire world economy still appeared to be on the verge of the Second Great Depression. The world's entire financial system had gone into cardiac arrest, with banks refusing to lend EVEN TO OTHER BANKS, an EXTRAORDINARY situation. The recovery had by NO MEANS already begun at that point. The gloom did not start to lift until March and April of 2009.
Bush I. His problem was that he continually denied during 1991 that America was IN a recession, though it was pretty damn obvious to the rest of the country that we were. When he was finally willing to acknowledge that we were in a recession, he did it in a very awkward way, by saying that "We're enjoying a recession, and we're not enjoying it very much". Which sounds more like some mangled sentence his son George might have come up with. And then there was that telling incident when George H.W. went shopping, to try to encourage other Americans to do the same; and he expressed amazement at the laser bar-code scanner in the store. Well, they had been in stores for nearly half a decade. Americans were pretty amazed when they saw that on TV, decided that George H.W. needed to 'get out more', and made sure he did, by dis-electing him.
Not clear to me that Clinton 'screwed up with the Dotcom bubble'. What should he have done about it? It's an old, old pattern in economic history, people getting overly excited about some new technology, and bidding up stock prices to absurd and irrational levels in the process. Same thing happened in the 1920's, when everyone got very excited about radios, refrigerators, and automobiles, the gee-whiz technologies of THAT time. If ANYONE should have DONE something about the Dotcom bubble, here's who that someone was: Alan Greenspam. See, I can't even spell his name correctly; that last 'N' always turns into an 'M', no matter how hard I try to get it right. I'm blaming it on the 'M' and 'N' keys being right next to each other on the QWERTY keyboard, although that excuse doesn't work when I misspell the name of Mitt Rmoney.