The Economy Is Still at the Brink

[groovedaddy]

WHETHER at a fund-raising dinner for wealthy supporters in Beverly Hills, or at an Air Force base in Nevada, or at Charlie Rose’s table in New York City, President Obama is conducting an all-out campaign to try to make us feel a whole lot better about the economy as quickly as possible. “It’s safe to say we have stepped back from the brink, that there is some calm that didn’t exist before,” he told donors at the Beverly Hilton Hotel late last month.

Mr. Obama thinks that the way to revive the economy is to restore confidence in it. If the mood is right, the capital will flow. But this belief is dangerously misguided. We are sympathetic to the extraordinary challenge the president faces, but if we’ve learned anything at all two years into the worst financial crisis of our lifetimes, it is that a capital-markets system this dependent on public confidence is a shockingly inadequate foundation upon which to rest our economy.

We have both spent large chunks of our lives working on Wall Street, absorbing its ethic and mores. We’re concerned that nothing has really been fixed. We’re doubly concerned that people appear to feel the worst of the storm is over — and in this, they are aided and abetted by a hugely popular and charismatic president and by the fact that the Dow has increased by 35 percent or so since Mr. Obama started to lay out his economic plans in March. But wishing for improvement and managing by the Dow’s swings are a fool’s game. (Disclosure: One of us, Mr. Lewis, was convicted on federal charges of stock manipulation in 1989, pardoned by President Bill Clinton in 2001 and had his lifetime trading ban overturned by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2006; documents relating to the case can be found at sblewis.net.)

The storm is not over, not by a long shot. Huge structural flaws remain in the architecture of our financial system, and many of the fixes that the Obama administration has proposed will do little to address them and may make them worse. At another fund-raising event, for Senator Harry Reid, President Obama said: “We didn’t ask for the challenges that we face. But we are determined to answer the call to meet those challenges, to cast aside the old arguments and overcome the stubborn divisions and move forward as one people and one nation .... It will take time but I promise you, I promise you, I’ll always tell you the truth about the challenges we face.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opinion/07cohanWEB.html?th&emc=th

[Coyote_Bandit]

1. You can tell Mr. Obama

that I will feel better about the economy when (1) I have a job that pays wages that permit me to be self-supporting and (2) I do not worry about dying or becoming disabled because I do not have meaningful access to healthcare and (3) I feel that my rights as a flesh and blood citizen are valued equally with those of multinational corporations.

Apparently he has embraced the trickle down theories of Saint Ronnie. I can expect to benefit and have my personal financial fortunes improve after everyone else does. No guarantee of that, of course.

Absent some tangible improvement in these areas I think maybe I'll skip that 2012 voting booth.....

[Hawkowl]

2. I'm not skipping it

I won't skip the voting booth, but I will demonstrate that no one can take my vote for granted.

[CoffeeCat]

3. Ughhh...

It has been blatantly obvious that this administration kindly asked the media to stop
acting as if the sky was falling. On one hand, I agree. We spent Q4 hearing gloom
and doom--complete with scary music and graphics.

The media did need to tone it down a bit.

However, what bothers me is that since Feb---we've been fed a steady dose of bullshit
that has been farcical. Silver linings and green shoots? Come on. Negative statistics
about the economy were positioned as "in the past" or they were twisted into good news, "Ya
see, it's not as bad as we thought!". Increased housing starts in March were positioned
as evidence of a new day--but we found out weeks later that the increase in starts was
due to more apartment construction, which signaled lack of confidence in buying a home.

Enough of this. Instead of the extremes, why can't they just tell us the truth? I don't
need crazy-fear crammed down my throat--but on the other hand, I don't need fake sunshine
blown in my face. Just treat us like adults. Report the facts.

And on another note--although I agree that gloomy consumers don't help anything, I'm
disappointed in the general push to get things back to the way they were. Is that what
we're doing now...are we supposed to return to credit-card spending and being good little
materialistic consumers? That's bogus. It's also not going to happen. People have
learned---some by losing their house, their jobs and their entire way of life!--that spending
and living like that--is stupid.

We need good jobs. We need to stop outsourcing. We need to make things. We need green
jobs and innovation. We don't need an economy propped up by a bunch of dullards heading
out to Pottery Barn and Target for more crapola.

[Wednesdays]

4. K&R

:kick:

[earth mom]

5. Obama is playing the game the way the banksters want him to.

The banksters don't give a shit about the workers

nor do they want the companies they have stocks in to pay a decent wage to the workers in the first place because it cuts into their precious profits.

What part of "tapped out" don't they get?! :argh:

[groovedaddy]

6. I agree. While something definately needed to be done, I don't think giving these crooks more

of our hard earned money is the answer. They have proven themselves to be untrustworthy.
The Federal government should have stepped in and created a national bank that would provide the services that these big banks should have been providing.