Obama too timid?

[Munger]

Re: Obama too timid?

I was only correcting the Krugman reference. Summers is fully one-half of the Team Obama problem, and has also been instrumental in ignoring Krugman Stiglitz etc.

[doom&gloom]

Re: Obama too timid?

you conveniently ignored Summers...

[Munger]

Re: Obama too timid?

Krugman has been famously shut out of the Obama administration. And the new-Keynesians have been criticizing the Obama economic policies from before they were even enacted as inadequate and misapplied. But whatever, don't let those facts get in your way.

[doom&gloom]

Re: Obama too timid?

what is there about timidity when he is executing absolutely the wrong policy every step of the way? When Larry "everything I touch turns to shyte" Summers is your main economic advisor, and Paul "I never met a stimulus dollar I didn;t want to spend" Krugman has you on speed-dial, how can you expect to do any better?

[Starving Steve]

Re: Obama too timid?

Consumption taxes are what are needed, NOT a carbon tax, and NOT tax-cuts. Austerity is what is needed, and not stimulus.

Cutting-spending is what is needed, NOT deficits. A stronger dollar linked to gold is what is needed, not more easy money. Higher interest rates are what is needed, not the ZIRP experiment of Bernanke and Greenspan.

Chopping the Education Dept. in Washington is what is needed. Chopping the Agriculture Dept, chopping Defence-spending, chopping the EPA, chopping the Federal Reserve System is what is needed.

More regulation of Wall Street and a separation of Wall Street from banks is what is needed. More guarantees for investors and savers are what is needed, nothing less than that.

A complete re-writing of the U.S. Constitution is what is needed: Campaigns have to be funded by government, not lobbyists in the private sector. An election should be called the very moment the Administration has lost its majority in the Congress. And Congress should not be allowed to drift in grid-lock, not even for one day. Also, deficits should be limited to the size of the GDP. The President should have a line-item veto. And the dollar should be tied to gold through a redemption clause printed on the currency.

There is no more time to pee-away with the U.S. Constitution written the way it is, because the system in Washington simply does not work, and it is corrupt from top-to-bottom.

[aaron]

Re: Obama too timid?

I vote MALICE. He is a tool to the Oligarchy.

[loweyecue]

Re: Obama too timid?

When the credit crisis caused a similarly monstrous economic crisis, it was met with a lackluster, compromised, half-assed response. -- I would argue that the lackluster, compromised, half-ased response is the result of the political process and the way we practice democracy. Any president would have had to compromise and the response would be equally half assed. The only way around that is for one party to have absolute power which to me is even worse. The problem is we expect different outcomes from the same age old process.

[oddlots]

I have felt from the beginning that Obama was more like Hoover than Roosevelt: he's obviously too invested in conventional thinking and power structures and arrived too early in the crisis to offer anything like "change."

Ritholtz asks an interesting question along these lines, citing the FT's Martin Wolf:

“Suppose that the US presidential election of 1932 had, in fact, taken place in 1930, at an early stage in the Great Depression. Suppose, too, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had won then, though not by the landslide of 1932. How different subsequent events might have been. The president might have watched helplessly as output and employment collapsed. The decades of Democratic dominance might not have happened.
On such chances the wheel of history turns. But this time was different: the crisis brought Barack Obama to power close to the beginning of the economic collapse. I (among others) then argued that policy needed to be hugely aggressive. Alas, it was not. I noted on February 4 2009, at the beginning of the new presidency: “Instead of an overwhelming fiscal stimulus, what is emerging is too small, too wasteful and too ill-focused.” A week later, I asked: “Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed? In normal times, this would be a ludicrous question. But these are not normal times. They are times of great danger. Today, the new US administration can disown responsibility for its inheritance; tomorrow, it will own it. Today, it can offer solutions; tomorrow it will have become the problem. Today, it is in control of events; tomorrow, events will take control of it. Doing too little is now far riskier than doing too much.” This was right.
The direction of policy was not wrong: policymakers – though not all economists – had learnt a great deal from the 1930s. Sensible people knew that aggressive monetary and fiscal expansion was needed, together with reconstruction of the financial sector.”

Ritholtz:


Wolf is, of course, exactly correct.
Consider the economic might brought to bear on the credit crisis — it was overwhelming force, nearly everything the Fed, Treasury and Congress could throw at a banking problem created by the private sector. The net result was a rescue, but at a cost of immense moral hazard and further unjust enrichment of the folks who caused the crisis in the first place.
When the credit crisis caused a similarly monstrous economic crisis, it was met with a lackluster, compromised, half-assed response. The response from the economy to such half-hearted political has been a yawn.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/09...-during-panic/