Nice Quote

Can somebody explain to me what did Mitt produce in exchange for the money he earned?

But I appreciate the implicit complement offered to Obama: that he could fix the economy in half the time it took W. to wreck it.

I understand he reorganized some weak or failing companies.

That all sounds pretty good to me, better than your average vulture capitalist. He sounds like he'd make an excellent President. You have inspired me to send him some campaign money.

It takes decades, generations to build up an economy. It takes very little time to wreck one, which is what's going on now. "Stimulus" to encourage "demand" just makes the long-term situation worse. It might help win elections, but the US public is fairly wise in the long term, so it might not.

What wrecked the economy was killing the Glass-Steagall act, and pushing fannie/freddy to make risky loans. Guess who did that? [1] Guess who warned against it? [2]

Bill Clinton, Barney Frank, and pals i.e. 155 other Democrats and 207 Republicans in the House and all but 8 Senators, on a bill sponsored by

Weird. This says the GLB law passed the Senate on a strict party line vote, with Fritz Hollings the only Democrat voting in favor:

And this shows the GLB law passed the House against Barney Frank's vote. Are you not perhaps thinking of Robert Franks of NJ?

Looks like the wikipedia .png is .wrng

Yea; one half of infinity IS (still) infinity...

I was hoping he would take over Home Depot -- from the linked article he seems to have a knack for running big box retailers.

His dad's company built cars and Jeeps -- somewhat quirky cars that prided themselves on their fuel economy. Unfortunately they were running out of gas (so to speak) by the time the oil shocks put a premium on economical cars.

The idiot bankers a) made a lot of money off of government policies, b) got bigger as a result.

So, who's the idiot? They have to do what the gov't tells them, so they decided to make money too. Thanks, gubmint.

Oh, and c) Europe's really in trouble banking-wise, mostly from central control buffoonery.

This article details it:

Ah, back to the ol' nonsense. "Stimulus" started under Hoover/Bush, then was put in overdrive by Roosevelt/Obama. It doesn't work.

Hey, I just saw a few actual empirical studies of the Keynsian multiplier for the stimulus. It was considerably less than 1, as I predicted. Conclusion? Any jobs produced were temporary, they vanish the moment stimulus ends, and the net effect was a loss to the economy, not a gain.

It took real economists a while to catch up with me, but now we're on the same page.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

If they'd been doing what the government told them, they would have been able to get cover under the CRA. What they actually did was to reason that if lending to some people on property in low income areas worked, lending to everybody who lived in a low income area would also work.

Can you spot the flaw in this reasoning?

More idiot bankers jumping to the wrong conclusions.

"Free minds and free markets". The minds are free of any constraint except that they have to concoct stories that will keep right-wing nitwits happy.

A tiny stimulus under Hoover didn't work. More stimulus under Roosevelt did.

The difference between GNP declining at about 6% per year and rising at about 1% per year may not appear significant to you. Few observers are quite that demented.

Where? Another of your "free minds for free markets" flatter the right- wing nitwits web-sites?

Unidentified source confirms your=A0prejudices. Why are we not surprised?

Relax, We know that you can't, and won't, understand anything published since Adam Smith.

Real - but unidentified - economists. One of the virtues of the free market is that you can always find an economist who will tell you want you want to hear. The ones that tell James Arthur what he wants to hear are about as much use for predicting the future as the average astrologer, but they - like astrologers - fill a need that people are prepared to pay for.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Worked for it? Used his brain?

Obama has fixed nothing at all, so why keep a 'leader' who can't lead? BO is a lair an fraud.

Rearranged chronologically:

#1-pushing fannie/freddy to make risky loans #2-killing the Glass-Steagall act

The first made the second necessary, and the second by itself was the removal of a regulation that never existed for European banks.

So as your side always does, you ignore #1 and point out that #2 was bi-partisan. Matt Damon and many other great documentarians have made a science of this.

Of course if we didn't go along in a bi-partisan way, then we would be the Party of "No." If we do go along, we are equally guilty.

But in this case everything depends on ignoring #1, and therefore pretending in a truly fantastic way that Fannie and Freddie's 4 trillion in debt came from nowhere, nor did it have any bearing on anything. So you can be said to have a fantastic point of view.

So we can thank the new debt for our 2% growth then, and also for the interest on the debt, which happens to be 2% of GDP. What a boon.

Shortly after George W. Bush was elected president, Congress and President Clinton were trying to pass a $384 billion omnibus spending bill, and while the debates swirled around the passage of this bill, Senator Phil Gramm clandestinely slipped a 262-page amendment into the omnibus appropriations bill titled: Commodity Futures Modernization Act. It is likely that few senators read this bill, if any.

Selective memory, eh.

Of course the senate voted for it, they did not know what they voted for.

Much more than Soros.

treading water is better than sinking.

Complement hell. BO is doing the same things that W did and considerably more and worse (more bailouts/stimulus, more war, more entitlements [but for different recipients], much higher deficits, etc.,). This also isn't fixing the economy. Now he wants another term of doing far worse that = his predecessor?

?-)