Dylan Ratigan just let a Bush toady say Bush inherited a recession which is a lie

[NNN0LHI]

Ratigan didn't correct him either. Is Ratigan that stupid? Bush did not inherit a recession. He caused a recession with his tax cuts for the wealthy.

Don

[unpossibles]

1. and of course these are the same people who tend to lay the current economic woes

at Obama's feet. In short, everything is always the Democrats' fault.

[amerstates]

2. He may not have inherited one, but it was there.

It is right there on the official little chart of America recessions showing start dates and ending dates.

[kentuck]

3. Yep. A recession with 4.1% unemployment.

That was a tough one.

[NNN0LHI]

4. Is that you Ratigan?

The economy was still expanding when Bush took office.

I think you need to do some research on this subject.

Don

[tabatha]

9. Actually, Ed Schultz corrected that and Ratigan agreed.

I think Ratigan and Maddow are the best on MSNBC!

[NNN0LHI]

10. It was Ratigans show

Soon as the Bush Toady told the lie Ratigan should have been all over him for insulting his intelligence.

If it had been a Dem he was talking to trying to rewrite history on live TV he sure would have.

Wouldn't he have?

He would have been screaming. He is a screamer.

Don

[tabatha]

11. Yes, I am watching Ratigan now. Schultz was on for a while.

[rurallib]

8. Do you have a link to that chart. IIRC the recession was started by Enron

in March of 2001 when they started fucking with California's power. The instability there in the biggest US state caused a wave throughout the rest of the country.

[shireen]

5. it's possible that Ratigan didn't want to

distract the topic of the interview by introducing a controversial subject.

Wikipedia has some interesting stuff about it.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which is the private, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization charged with determining economic recessions, the U.S. economy was in recession from March 2001 to November 2001, a period of eight months at the beginning of President George W. Bush's term of office. However, economic conditions did not satisfy the common shorthand definition of recession, which is "a fall of a country's real gross domestic product in two or more successive quarters," and has led to some confusion about the procedure for determining the starting and ending dates of a recession.

The NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee (BCDC) uses monthly, rather than quarterly, indicators to determine peaks and troughs in business activity<1>, as can be seen by noting that starting and ending dates are given by month and year, not quarters. However, controversy over the precise dates of the recession led to the characterization of the recession as the "Clinton Recession" by Republicans, if it could be traced to the final term of President Bill Clinton. A move in the recession date in a 2004 report by the Council of Economic Advisors to several months before the one given by the NBER was seen as politically motivated.<2> BCDC members suggested they would be open to revisiting the dates of the recession as newer and more definitive data became available.<3>

....

Nonetheless, as of early 2008, no further revision to the dates has been made.

From 2000 to 2001, the Federal Reserve in a move to quell the stock market, made successive interest rate increases, credited in part for "plunging the country into a recession."<4> Using the stock market as an unofficial benchmark, a recession would have begun in March 2000 when the NASDAQ crashed following the collapse of the Dot-com bubble. ....

I'm no economics expert but the start date of that recession is pretty nebulous, but Clinton probably did not cause it. The Federal Reserve probably played a big role in it. But the current mess we're in, that officially started in late 2007 but was starting to hurt people much earlier, well ... we have GWB's administration and the Federal Reserve to thank for it!

Can any economists chime in, and let me know if i got it wrong?

[NNN0LHI]

7. Lets see what The National Bureau of Economic Research has to say about it

http://www.nber.org/cycles/recessions.html

The NBER’s Recession Dating Procedure

Business Cycle Dating Committee, National Bureau of Economic Research

Robert Hall, Chair
Martin Feldstein, President, NBER
Jeffrey Frankel
Robert Gordon
Christina Romer
David Romer
Victor Zarnowitz
October 21, 2003



This report is also available as a PDF file.

The National Bureau's Business Cycle Dating Committee maintains a chronology of the U.S. business cycle. The chronology identifies the dates of peaks and troughs that frame economic recession or expansion. The period from a peak to a trough is a recession and the period from a trough to a peak is an expansion. According to the chronology, the most recent peak occurred in March 2001, ending a record-long expansion that began in 1991. The most recent trough occurred in November 2001, inaugurating an expansion.

A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales. A recession begins just after the economy reaches a peak of activity and ends as the economy reaches its trough. Between trough and peak, the economy is in an expansion. Expansion is the normal state of the economy; most recessions are brief and they have been rare in recent decades.

On November 26, 2001, the committee determined that the peak of economic activity had occurred in March of that year. For a discussion of the committee's reasoning and the underlying evidence, see http://www.nber.org/cycles/november2001. The March 2001 peak marked the end of the expansion that began in March 1991, an expansion that lasted exactly 10 years and was the longest in the NBER's chronology. On July 16, 2003, the committee determined that a trough in economic activity occurred in November 2001. The committee's announcement of the trough is at http://www.nber.org/cycles/july2003. The trough marks the end of the recession that began in March 2001. The 2001 recession thus lasted eight months, which is somewhat less than the average duration of recessions since World War II. The postwar average, excluding the 2001 recession, is eleven months.

In choosing the dates of business-cycle turning points, the committee follows standard procedures to assure continuity in the chronology. Because a recession influences the economy broadly and is not confined to one sector, the committee emphasizes economy-wide measures of economic activity. The committee views real GDP as the single best measure of aggregate economic activity. In determining whether a recession has occurred and in identifying the approximate dates of the peak and the trough, the committee therefore places considerable weight on the estimates of real GDP issued by the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The traditional role of the committee is to maintain a monthly chronology, however, and the BEA's real GDP estimates are only available quarterly. For this reason, the committee refers to a variety of monthly indicators to determine the months of peaks and troughs.

The committee places particular emphasis on two monthly measures of activity across the entire economy: (1) personal income less transfer payments, in real terms and (2) employment. In addition, the committee refers to two indicators with coverage primarily of manufacturing and goods: (3) industrial production and (4) the volume of sales of the manufacturing and wholesale-retail sectors adjusted for price changes. The committee also looks at monthly estimates of real GDP such as those prepared by Macroeconomic Advisers (see http://www.macroadvisers.com). Although these indicators are the most important measures considered by the NBER in developing its business cycle chronology, there is no fixed rule about which other measures contribute information to the process.

Figure 1 shows the recent movements of quarterly real GDP superimposed on the average movement around troughs over the previous six recessions. GDP reached a peak in the fourth quarter of 2000. This was followed by contraction during the first three quarters of 2001 and growth since then. According to revised data released in September 2003 (http://www.bea.doc.gov/bea/newsrel/gdp203p.htm), real GDP increased at an annual rate of 3.3 percent in the second quarter of 2003, and 1.4 percent in the first quarter.

Figure 2 shows the movements in real personal income less transfers. Real personal income fell in early 2001. It reached its low point in October 2001 and then generally rose throughout 2003, reached its highest level in July 2003. It fell slightly in August, the most recent reported month. A comparison of Figures 1 and 2 shows that personal income has grown less rapidly than real GDP. The reasons for this are discussed in the frequently asked question on this topic below.

Figure 3 shows the behavior of payroll employment. The movement of this series is quite different from the output-based measures. Employment reached a peak in February 2001 and declined through July 2002. It rose slightly through November, but with the exception of January 2003, declined throughout 2003 until it rose in September, the most recent reported month. It is now 484,000 below the start of the year, and 2.7 million below the February 2001 peak. The fact that employment continued to decline while output-based measures rose reflects the fact that productivity has risen substantially since late 2001.

The other monthly series were generally declining in 2001 but have for the most part been rising since then. Industrial production fell until December 2001 and then rose rapidly until July 2002. It has fallen slightly since then. Real manufacturing wholesale-retail sales reached its low in September 2001. This series has generally risen since then. May, June, and July 2003, the three most recent reported months, all show substantial increases. Real GDP, according to monthly estimates provided by Macroeconomic Advisers, also reached a low in September 2001 and has generally been growing since then. It reached its highest point ever in July 2003, but was followed by a slight drop in August, the most recent reported month.

For more information, see the FAQs at the end of this memo, and also see http://www.nber.org/cycles/main.html. An Excel spreadsheet containing the data and figures for a number of indicators of economic activity considered by the committee is available at that page as well.

[Bitwit1234]

6. They would blame President Clinton

and now President Obama for everything bad thing that has happened since the beginning of time if the could. AND THE RIGHT WING NUTSO would go along with it.

[Berry Cool]

12. It's an old lie they have told over and over. "Bush inherited a mild recession

from the previous administration."

They have all memorized it so well it falls off their lips with no thought at all.

[FarCenter]

13. It was mainly the dotcom bust and the hangover of excessive IT spending during Y2K

Telecom companies were also in sever decline. Nortel and Lucent were severly hurt. Lots of smaller networking and personal computer companies went belly up.

[kentuck]

14. There are so many of them...

You almost have to pick and choose which one to call them on.

[Igel]

15. There are lots of them.

Bush II didn't inherit a recession, however there was a lot of talk about it in the campaign and the quasi-campaign after the 2000 elections. Why? Because the leading indicators all said "recession". Just as the leading indicators now, much ballyhooed and taken at face value, all say "recovery". To say that he inherited a recession is false. Yet everybody at the time--largely on partisan lines--either read the leading indicators as predictive or as simply irrelevant. The attitude seems to be that the NASDAQ crash and stock market problems in 2000 were indicative of an economy that was just forging ahead with no end in sight.

I like leading indicators. They sometimes predict more recessions than there are, but they're still the best we've got. Now, as then.

The tax cuts under Bush II were signed into law in July 2001. So you claim he caused a recession that started in 3/2001 by actions that were passed by Congress and signed into law 4 months after the recession started. To say that the 2001 tax cuts caused the recession is false--we can search for factors to blame *, but it's basically a scavenger hunt to support a hypothesis with no attempt made to falsify it. The cuts had been proposed before the recession started but it's pretty hard for a president's policies to cause a recession starting 41 days after he takes office. (Possible, I suppose, but difficult.)

I say the same thing about what I've heard from conservatives--that the Obama stimulus made the current recession much worse.

The same can be said about the recession that many say Clinton inherited in 1993. The problem is that the recession ended before the elections. Nonetheless there was a recession-ending stimulus package passed after Clinton took office often credited with ending what was concluded over a year before the first stimulus monies were disbursed. Employment, a lagging indicator, was still down.

I think the confusion is that we like to say only good things about us and those like us, and only bad things about others and those not like us. For 1993, we look at employment and say Clinton inherited a recession and ignore other economic indicators as we look at inauguration day as being truly meaningful. For 2001, we look at NBER's determination, regardless of employment and leading indicators, and look at inauguration day as being truly meaningful. For 2009, we look at leading indicators and, if need be, we ignore job creation--and we assume that the economy trucked along oblivious to inauguration day. (I continue to find asymmetries amusing. Of course, repubs make pretty much the opposite conclusions--no less asymmetrical, just differently so.)