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Obama Not to Blame for the Economy’s Collapse
We can’t recall ever having spoken a kind word about Barack Obama, nor do we even imagine him capable of saying or doing something that might bring us around. However, we do not – repeat, do not – blame him for the terminal state of the economy. It was headed irretrievably into a Second Great Depression long before he took office, and the things he has tried so far to forestall a day of reckoning are, for the most part, the same things that any president, Democrat or Republican, would have tried. Nothing would have worked, of course, because the deflation that the U.S. and the rest of the world have been trying so desperately to counteract is drawing irresistible force from an imploding derivatives bubble valued notionally at nearly a quadrillion dollars. Small wonder, then, that a relatively puny stimulus effort amounting to mere trillions of dollars has bought us only time, not growth, and done so in a way that will burden future generations with more debt than they will be able to service, let alone repay.
To be sure, a solution has always lain well outside the boundaries of political discussion. The best we could have hoped for was a legislative sausage pleasing to the tastes of Harry Reid and John Boehner alike. But nothing those two could conceivably have agreed on would have brought the economy around. Nor would a change at the top have helped. Put someone else in the White House not handicapped by Mr. Obama’s timidity, incompetence and cluelessness – New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is our idea of the right guy for the job – and even he would have failed to slow the country’s slide into deepest recession, let alone reverse it. For in fact we face 30% unemployment, a wave of bank failures that will rival the 1930s, and a real estate washout that will double the devastation that has already occurred. All of this is coming, and even though a President Christie, in the heat of the banking crisis of 2008-09, might have proffered the only correct answer – i.e., let the banks fail, allowing the markets to clear and the economy to right itself – it is inconceivable that he could have sold this course of non-action to Congress.
What Will Be ‘Money’?
And so, we can only wait nervously for the trigger event that will cause the economy to implode, unsanctioned. There is no predicting when this will occur, but the May 2010 Flash Crash provides strong reason to think that it will be mostly over – at least, the digital-financial part of it – in time for the evening news. The morning after, the desperate concern of nearly every American will be…money. It doesn’t take a rocket scientists to recognize that credit cards will no longer be the coin of the realm at that point. And just what might be? Silver and gold coins would be our guess, along with what little U.S. currency happens to be circulating when the music stops. If you are not prepared for something like this now, you ought to be. We’ll conclude with a link to the best book we’ve read to help you get ready, Sean Brodrick’s The Ultimate Suburban Survivalist Guide.
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the guys a one-time bit player in the bush league. he's hitless in 3 yrs with more errors than a ground hog on april 1st!
georgie boy, and we haven't been hit yet, haliburtin loser,... needed a flare-up poster child for the perpetual pyrrhic victory torch changing ogligarch guard.
listen,... its easier to be a warring president than a domestic housewife? three years of babble and the drooling is drowning out the rhetoric that comes from this rear guard wannabe that about faces the countries needs with status quo maximus.
i have no idea what political party he cleaves to, or for that matter his idiopathic narcissistic plutocracy mantra disseminates as a pragmatic narrative?
what the big "O" has done to our civil liberties - our ability to think and act on our own - the flipity-floppity abuse of supreme commander is all the more reason that 4 yrs is way to much time to let this grave digger drill us a path to "China with Love".
when you promise change and hope, and deliver despair, and angst,... theirs no more reason for questions!
Mitt Romney and Ron Paul 2012
O'bama was, according to Brez...the Dem's MAnchurian candidate, to fulfill the 'I have a dream' syndrome. Perfect antidote to GWB's dumber than dumb 'clash of civilization' and 'its the oligarchy, dumbo' response to Clintonian 'subprime Freddie and Fanny capitalism- it's the economy, stupid' soft balling. You have to keep the show moving...right? right!
We had the perfect 'punch and judy' show for two headed - one party oligarchy inspired race of bringing obese, over pampered middle america to rocky bottom. Reaganomics's mystical 'fuckem-trickle down haha misery' vision of 'elitist USA, USA,' has now come to fruition.
Now the next step : make the world a NWO cess pool of 'debt misery' sheeple. Then we will REALLY BE HOME N DRY!
We will have a hundred year reign of Oligarchs, why not a thousand year Reich if 'they' can swing it in... 'we're doing this in the name of world progress, to eradicate misery and poverty globally',... like all true Americans filled with compassion aspire to.
Long live the Forbes 500 of 'happy few' billions. This is the greatest show in town and it must go on. Dallas, Dynasty, American Idol...Whisteria lane fantasy land, sold to the sheeple world. And...who said that we were in financial meltdown?
Not us baby, we are pioneer USA! ra, ra ra !!
Problem is:
We don't (and may never) have a President or a Congress who will tell the American people the truth which is that we are simply servants to the financial elite who control money printing, interest rates, credit ratings, etc. specifically for their gain at our expense!
Won't matter as more and more folks come off the radar and do whatever it takes to survive. People's definaition of "wealth" and "purchasing power" will continue to change. Already happening around the world, more barter taking place using real goods and services and less fiat. Hedge accordingly, it is all you can really do anyway.
And so it begins: Jews for theBamster. Watch for it. Ackerman is not the first....
I'm taking all bets that theBamster will be POTUS until 1916. Unless something happens to him in office.
like what? TPTB kick him upstairs to be Chairman of the Fed?
Careful with those veiled threats against our President. You may be just another anonymous coward to most readers in this forum, but that doesn't mean you are anonymous to all who visit here.
Take a look at a chart of discretionary spending and you will see that it took off on a 45 degree climb during the Reagan administration and hasn't looked back under either party. That tajectory validates you argument that neither party was stopping this thing. It doesn't absolve those who are jointly and severably liable for their actions.
We are busted, it doesn't matter who takes the pilot's seat when the wings already came off the plane.
Only if he masters time travel.
Pantload of bullfunky. Ogolfer is complicit.
If only we all would have just ponied up another 15 trillion or so of our hard earned money to the gubmit, all this could have been avoided...........
hes the vampire squids head pirhana, just like the ones before him
In other words, any other president would have done the same, as in sold out taxpayers to the banks?
Hope and change. Yes we can.
Note to self, when ranking 'Favorites' media by merit and insight, put Rick Ackerman under CNBC
2 years of a super majority. Congress passed what was important to the Democrats and now we're Trillions more in debt, have a reduced credit rating, and unemployment is stuck at 9% +. Now the Democrats are telling us that if they just had a little more money from the rich folks they could solve all of our problems. Nope.
2012: Anyone but Obama
If he has to be blamed it for keeping the iditotic Bush policies. We still have the unfunded tax spending on millionaires. We still are in 2 wars. We still have the same cabal from Wall Street making decisions on our economic path. We still have big corporates in charge.
At the end of the day he was brought in to effect change and all we got is more of the same!
This is the dumbest article I think I have ever read on this site. You have no idea how bad the regulatory requirements for Obamacare and Dodd-Frank are having on job creation do you? Obama's number one priority as president was national health care and not the economy. That should tell you all you need to know of how clueless this socialist leaning president has been regarding our economy.
FYI, posted by me in my own forum:
His putrid commie health plan will never be enacted, Mava. Even still-born, though, it is hugely raising our premiums. But that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to things that have been going on for two generations that have brought on a new Depression.
Concerning "the dumbest article," you sound like the kinda guy who could find plenty more dumbest articles if you look around.
RA
I am baffled by the people and mostly intelligent people on site like ZH who are still divided along political lines while not realising that both the left and right are drinking from the same fountain where the water is provided by big corporations.
What is usually left out of the senses we possess as Homo Sapiens, in addition to Sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste is HYPOCRISY.
It's hard being me.
it's hard understanding you : o)
Only if you're stupid.
How is it that 'corporations' are to blame? Most of us work for corporations, so may want to rethink killing those off or choking off their profits. Isn't the problem really DC , Federal reserve, and the banking industry that are sucking the blood out of the middle class? I don't comprehend the Occupy Wall Street and 'we are the 99%' mentality that wants to kill off the wrong component and put more power in to the hands of those that got us in this mess in the first place.
with respect morgan here's my counter argument
corporations used to employ the lions share of private sector workers, but no longer.
corporations are outsourcing and offshoring jobs in the pursuit of more profit, while paying less than 10% of govt's tax revenue.
corporations discourage free innovation among their workers, as they claim credit (and resulting profits) from workers creations
corporations engage in anti-competitive practices (buffet's 'moats'), abusing patents to wage legal wars with each other
corporations and their teams of lawyers/lobbyists hijack the democratic process in order to marginalize and destroy democracy and capitalism, in favor of establishing coporatetocracy and kleptocracy
corporations reward short term profits over long term vision, abusing laws to avoid corporate responsibility and accountability
corporations monetize potential profits before they are realized using tools such as leveraged buyouts, exponentially transferring risks onto others
corporations privatize wealth among their respective inner circle, at the same time nationalizing bad debts they incurred onto the people
the banks are dirty no question.....but it is the government being in bed with them that is the real issue......the governments outrageous size and power allows them to be bedfellows....Our government is esentially a corporation, the largest, most inefficient corporation in the world. Who is worse - he who offers the bribe or he who takes the bribe? If the government was limited to its original intended size lobbyists would cease to exist because those they were trying to buy off wouldn't have the power to do it. For me finger pointing starts with D.C. and the fed then to corporate america.
Corporations don't pay tax. Customers pay tax; everything gets pushed through to customers.
There is no logical reason for a corporation to pay taxes. By eliminating taxes on corporations, we immediately move from one of the highest tax nations to the lowest tax nation. We make our products cheaper and more competitive.
The next step is to put the lap band around the bloated belly of government. Shave down its calorie usage to match its intake so that we don't have to tax the crap out of real people and end the suffocating bureaucracy.
Finally, let's get the many troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq and Germany and Kuwait and the three gazillion state department people out of Angola that I met on the plane back from S. Africa. Yes, they're floating on oil. If anyone wants our armies, then they best be prepared to pay for us to be there.
End.
while im behind your bloated govt argument about ending wars, i strongly disagree on eliminating corporate taxes. I don't know where you get your stats from, but of all the developed western nations we have the lowest tax rates. corporations are considered to be 'persons' under federal law, EVERY LOGIC AND REASON tells us that corporations must pay tax. besides, in the absence of tax their products will not become cheaper and more competitive, unless they could match the level of labor enslavement and environmental destruction seen in countries like china. eliminating corporate tax is absolutely the wrong thing to do in times when our national debt is surging past 15 trillion dollars.
I'm in favor of increasing corporate tax rate to over 50% to make up for what they stole from us in the past. If we can end these monopolistic MNC's, there will be a lot of room for healthy competitions between small businesses that create jobs and increase govt tax revenue to pay off our mounting debts. this is not Reaganomics, as purely competitive markets restores productive and allocative efficiency which the corporations have destroyed. what we need is free market and competition, corporations hate those things. Unless corporations can somehow learn to promote free market and competition, we ought to enact laws to break them up, tax them down to size, outlaw lobbying and anonymize political donations, and take away their patent rights when corporations engage in anti-competitive behaviors.
well said
obama isn't any more responsible for the economy than bush was for 9/11. (which is not to say he has been exonerated) if bush would have recognized the threat he might have stopped it, we'll never know will we (the two events are linked by the way)
obama was dumb not to let the economy play out the excesses, then use the next four years to show some improvement. that would have guaranteed him four more years, and the Am people would have confidence in their leader, which is important, no matter how big a moron the person might be.
he should have bailed out the people first, and the bankers second.
he should have done a lot of things, and now WE all pay for it.
now its time to hit the resets button, and TBTF, no way this time around, but we have lost precious time and done damage to the system. a mostly unforgivable waste.
Mentioning 9.11 as an off-hand comment is just going to piss people off. People here have either bought the Reichstag story because they have not done due diligence or are afraid to face reality, or they know their shit and understand that it was a false flag stand down. The most vehement neocon apologists have no answer for many of the discrepencies between reality and the official story, including many of the story's lynchpins. As Obama would say, 'the debate is over' - the 'official story' side never showed up. They told their story, repeated it ad-anuseum, and left it at that. We've since learned enough to know that the official story is wrong, in countless ways. Their only answer is character assassination.
...and there's bill clinton who had ample information and a building in NYC blown up on his watch who didn't seem to get it.
a) Clinton gave the GOP a no-fly zone over Iraq
b) Right wing smear campaigners hounded him for womanizing
c) Administrative Impeachment proceedings
d) Intel shows Bin Laden in Afghanistan, asks permission to fire some cruise missiles
e) Clinton calls up the GOP, they say thanks for the no-fly zone, but we've got your partisan winky hanging
f) Bush steps in, cleans out Clintons desk, except for WTO. signs it into law two weeks after 9/11
g) Economy loses jobs jobs jobs, administration begins and ends on a recession
h) Clinton shouldn't have done what he did, the GOP shouldn't have put partisan politics above national security.
i) The Chinese have something to do with 9/11.
Obama surrounded himself exclusively with the architects of the Collapse and in doing so has perpetuated it. Moreover tgether with his AG those who were lead and bit players in creating and profiting from the Collapse have been given a pass as they continue to feed at the trough. To suggest that he is not responsible is true if by that you mean its origin. But he is responsible for its depth and duration as well as the seeds that have been sown for the next Collapse.
Might I suggest that your headline was nothing more than click bait and for that you should hang your head in shame and exit by way of the service entrance, to the clown car driven by Henry Blodget.
Click-bait? That's how I make my living, Nameless. There is nothing misleading about the headline.
RA
Other than printing money, and doing bailouts, has he really promoted anything that would positively impact the economy for anyone not involved with finance and banking industries? No. Instead he pushed Obamacare down our throats in the dark of night, and put more regulation in place, all of which will just hamper efforts to truly 'stimulate' the economy in a real sense, not just in some Keynsian fantasy sense.
when peak oil hits you'll be glad for obamacare; you'll need a couple of foot replacements from having to walk to work
LOL - you're assuming I'll still have a job.........
well, if you need a reference, i'll be glad to help : o)
Give me a break. How fuckin long can a guy play the, " it was already going that way " card.
Hell by all means we should give the fascist/socialist, special interest cowtowing, neo-con in liberal clothing, peon another 4 years because it's not his fault.
Bullshit.
Politicians need to be HELD ACCOUNTABLE. If you dont do what you were put in place to do then you are gone. Period. End of story.
If THE president is not the one to blame for not quickly getting around this and using the bully pulpit to get popular opinion to move Congress in the right direction then who is? If every new president needs the first two years to gain power, lay out an agenda and gather support which by definition cannot come from the other 49% due to political issues, then who can fix this...too bad for Obama that he didn't come in during the 2012 election because it is likely by that time this will have collapsed and will be ready for its FDR moment when someone with speech capabilities can rally the cowed sheeple.
NEOSERF
He came in,had control of BOTH the Senate and House.He could have done anything he wanted, and did.
All the wrong things.
He was more interested in his BACKERS Political Agenda, than any Americans welfare.Or, the country as a whole.
Well either way short of Martial Law and a Dictatorship, we get another black man for POTUS from the GOP side.
Let's see what his agenda brings.......................it's a slam dunk.
Who is to say that Obama hasn't done exactly what he was supposed to do? Bring this sombitch down, hard, and default on the national debts. Screwing China and a few Europeans in the process. How else is the U. S. supposed to climb out of this hole? If that's the case I'd say he's doing a fine job.
True.
Key words:
Banks.
Compound interest.
Ponzi finance.
Derivatives.
Deregulation (of banks).
Monetarism/Chicago School/Reaganism.
I have seen this coming for over thirty years ... this final collapse of everything everyone has gotten used to, e.g. owning a house, driving a car and shopping at some supermarket.
Finished.
The latter-day Roman Empire - Washington/London Empire - is nearly over.
May you be cursed to live in interesting times.
Rick,
. It was headed irretrievably into a Second Great Depression long before he took office, and the things he has tried so far to forestall a day of reckoning are, for the most part, the same things that any president, Democrat or Republican, would have tried.
While I agree w/75% of what you said, I call BS on Obama not causing the ECONOMY to turn around.
The lack of new jobs, and hiring, are directly because of HIS new policies, Obamacare, and rules and regs, that did,is, has SCARED the hell out of anyone in business, of thinking of doing so.
So in that regards, he's EXPEDITED the velocity of the dynamics....immeasuably.
He, and his Dem Congress, passing all these GOTTA PASS IT before we can read it crap, has more trap doors than a medieval castle.
FEAR of the unknown, from his admin IS directly to blame for an economy not in POSITIVE territory.
Obama and ACORN sued banks to give loans to anybody for anything or theyr were racist. Mortgages for people who had no clue. They have blocked ANY domestic energy production which creates wealth versus green energy looting of the Treasury. Obama has made it 10X worse even thous McCain is a another Demoreep.
To reiterate my point: Nothing that was politically feasible could have turned the economy around, least of all a Big Government effort to create "jobs". Sure, Obamacare, even only 15% implemented, is a drag on the economy. But the slide into Depression was all but ordained since the early 1990s, when we powered out of a supposedly "mild" recession that almost took Citi down (as reported by Jim Grant, though not by anyone else). The "success" of the Resolution Trust Corp deluded us into thinking that a cyclical upswing in the economy would eventually do the trick. That kind of thinking allowed us to get in much deeper this time.
Why would they read the bills they pass? Isn't congress exempt from them? What do they care......but remember, that's NOT the problem, those evil corporations are THE problem.
Rick...what else is there to say....you're an idot. Your Oped's just got downgraded to BBB-
If I'm an 'idot', then I guess that makes you a morn.
pay no attention to the soothsayers here who can actually tell you what life would be like if this happened or this did not. they don't need Clarence the angel from 'It's a Wonderful Life" to do so. they see the the big picture while brushing their teeth.
They are all Peak Oil Scaredy Cats and the Maginot Line of their Denial is to blame the bad economy on Obama and Bernanke instead of the fact that we are running out of oil.
It's interesting that the climate change crowd doesn't use this argument as their biggest club, if it's a slam dunk that oil is disappearing so fast that it's going to make real growth impossible. Instead they're trying to sell us on the idea that carbon use is killing the planet, something harder to relate to than an end to your way of life.
I'm not saying they don't make this argument, I've seen it sporadically, but it's not front and center. My gut feeling is that oil is not a fossil fuel, and that it is very abundant even in its liquid form, but perhaps easily accessible in that form only in certain places, which explains some of the conflict around these areas. Or perhaps it is more readily available than we think, and the conflicts are both about securing easy access points, and building up the notion that it's running out. The oil business is made much more lucrative through controlling supply and fostering the notion of scarcity, real or not.