The Obama Economy

Atlanta Fed Chief Dennis Lockhart says that if the national unemployment rate were figured by the old rules - including those who are underemployed and those who have stopped looking for work - that rather than the outrageous 9.4% rate touted by the Obama administration, the real rate of unemployment is approximately 16%.

Lockhart, whose knowledge of economics is more advanced than the guesswork indulged in by the Obama administration, says that public spending will not solve the unemployment problem. He additionally forecasts a protracted period of recession typified by perennial joblessness, and calls fears about excessive government spending leading to high deficits and inflation "warranted."

Economist John Williams of shadowstats.com estimates that, when all data is taken into consideration, the real unemployment rate is teetering on the brink of The Great Depression's 25%. In an article at U.S. News & World Report, Williams is quoted:

So if you care not just about people who meet the official definition of "unemployed" but also about people who are dropping out of the labor force, 2009 seems to be trailing 1982 in terms of the health of the labor market. Williams says that when he takes into consideration people who haven't looked for work in more than a year because they can't find jobs, the real unemployment rate today goes all the way up to 20.6 percent by his calculations. "It won't take much to get it to the worst since the Great Depression," he says.

Whether you go with the Atlanta Fed's number of 16% or John Williams' number approaching 21%, it is plain that Obama will indeed go down in history...

... with Hoover.

Credit Where the Credit Crisis Is Due

I have demonstrated previously on the hallowed pages of Obama Watch that the economic crisis as it now exists is fully the fault of the Democratic party in the United States. Their semi-retarded politics designed it and, while it is certain that some Republicans cooperated with and facilitated their (always) hare-brained ideas, it is also true that Democrats intentionally stepped over the bodies of protesting Republicans to enact the policies that have brought on the current economic morass.

A crisis of the magnitude of that which the country now faces has the interesting consequence of producing stark honesty where one would not necessarily expect to find such honesty. In reading the book, A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers, author Lawrence G. Mcdonald, who seems generally very sympathetic to Bill Clinton personally and to his administration, nevertheless writes (from the historical perspective of an industry insider - Mcdonald was a Vice President at Lehman Brothers):

Roberta Achtenberg, the daughter of a Russian-born owner of a Los Angeles neighborhood grocery store, was plucked by President Clinton from relative obscurity in 1993 and elevated to the position of assistant secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Roberta and Bill were united in their desire to increase home ownership in poor and minority communities.



And despite a barrage of objections led by Senator Jesse Helms, who referred to Achtenberg as that "damn lesbian," the lady took up her appointment in the new administration, citing innate racism as one of the main reasons why banks were reluctant to lend to those without funds.

In the ensuing couple of years, Roberta Achtenberg harnessed all of the formidable energy on the massed ranks of the United States bankers, sometimes threatening, sometimes berating, sometimes bullying - anything to persuade the banks to provide mortgages to people who might not have been up to the challenge of coping with up-front down payments and regular monthly payments.

Between 1993 and 1999, more than two million such clients became new homeowners. In her two-year tenure as assistant secretary, she set up a national grid of offices staffed by attorneys and investigators. Their principal aim was to enforce the laws against the banks, the laws that dealt with discrimination. Some of the fines leveled at the banks ran into the millions, to drive home Achtenberg's avowed intent to utilize the law to change the ethos of providing mortgage money in the United States of America.

Banks were compelled to jump into line, and soon they were making thousands of loans without any cash-down deposits whatsoever: an unprecedented situation. Mortgage officers inside the banks were forced to bend or break their own rules in order to achieve a good Community Reinvestment Act rating, which would please the administration by demonstrating generosity to underprivileged borrowers even if they might default. Easy mortgages were the invention of Bill Clinton's Democrats.

However, there was, in the mid- to late 1990s one enormous advantage: amid general prosperity, the housing market was strong and prices were rising steadily. At that point in time, mortgage defaults were relatively few in number and the securitization of mortgages, which had such disastrous consequences during the financial crisis that began in 2007, barely existed.

Nonetheless, there were many beady-eyed financiers who looked askance at this new morality and privately yearned for the days when bank policies were strictly conservative, when credit was flatly denied to anyone without the proven ability to repay.

And at the center of this seething disquiet, somewhere between the persuasive silken-tongued members of the banking lobby and the missionary zeal of Roberta Achtenberg, stood William J. Clinton, whose heart, not for the first time, may have been ruling his head.

Emphasis added throughout. But catch the specific wording: "innate racism" is the reason that loans were not extended to "those without funds"? The Clintonistas were willing to do "anything to persuade the banks to provide mortgages to people who might not have been up to the challenge of coping with up-front down payments and regular monthly payments"? Achtenberg's intent was to "change the ethos of providing mortgage money"? Banks and mortgage companies were "forced to break their own rules"?

Now hear this: "Easy mortgages were the invention of Bill Clinton's Democrats." And all those mortgage companies, investment banks, and community banks that are now getting the blame were nonetheless peopled by "beady-eyed financiers who looked askance at this new morality."

Remember, the same people who designed this economic earthquake are in the process of taking over large swathes of American business, the energy industry, and health care - and in the case of Congressional Democrats, it is not merely the same party, but actually the same people involved.

The Democratic party is either populated by the largest concentration of morons in the universe, or is populated by an exceedingly large contingent of wholly evil individuals who are bent on pursuing their utopian political goals in the face of reality and at the expense of their constituents. What idiot actually believes that racism is the reason that banks won't lend money to people who can't pay? What fool thinks that it is a positive step forward to compel banks to forsake their own rules and extend loans to those who have not even demonstrated an ability to regularly and fully pay rent? Only Democrats are capable of these anti-intellectual paroxysms into mental disease. Or at least they are the only ones who can do it and escape being committed....

Are these the people that you really want to trust to do what is best for you and the country in regard to your health care? Have these same individuals not already demonstrated their inarguable inability to get anything right? Look around....

Democrat, thy name is guilty. See what thou hast wrought.

Obama Logic

The following is an outline of the development of the logic of the Obamazombies as it regards the economy. Something is missing that I can't quite figure out. Perhaps someone would be good enough to help explain it all to me?

1) Prior to the election: "The American economy is the Worst Since The Great Depression! Vote for me! I can fix it!"

2) Immediately after the election: "The American economy is the Worst Since The Great Depression - but we will halt its decline in its tracks! Thanks for voting for me! I am now going to fix it!"

3) Following the stimulus passage: "Yes, unemployment for Bush's last year was 4.60%, signifying the Worst Economy Since The Great Depression! Now the unemployment rate is 9.5%, signifying that the stimulus package is WORKING!"





[Free information - no additional charge: If the unemployment rate were figured today using the same methods as were used 50 years ago, the current unemployment rate is pressing 18%. You are welcome for this free information.]

3) As the economy has become progressively worse: "Nobody knew the economy was THIS bad! Why, it's the Worst Economy Since The Great Depression! It's not our fault we can't fix it!"

4) Joe (Silver Tongue) Biden: "So we guessed wrong.... Who woulda thunk that the economy was this bad? If we don't spend more money, we'll go bankrupt!"

I think that the technical term for the above is "having it every which way."

Medical doctors generally refer to such disordered thinking as "confusion," and send the patient off to be checked for a head injury.

My grandmother called it "lying."

Honesty, From An Unlikely Source

The February 23 double issue of Time magazine contained an article by Nancy Gibbs titled "25 People to Blame: The good intentions, bad managers and greed behind the meltdown." In it, a "murderer's row" of 25 people (not surprisingly heavy on placing corporate blame, sometimes in the most ludicrous manner; Angelo Mozilo is listed for merely co-founding Countrywide in 1969!) whom the masses may sharpen their pitchforks and skewer in their rage over the recent housing meltdown.

But buried within the usual journalistic [sic] pablum is a heaping big admission - one of the primary souls responsible for the meltdown was Bill Clinton.

"[Bill Clinton] loosened housing rules, putting added pressure on banks to lend in low-income neighborhoods."

It has been repeatedly alleged on the sanctified pages of Obama Watch that Clinton and the Congressional Black Caucus (and their social-engineering fellowtravelers, like Barney Frank) are in fact primarily responsible for the housing meltdown.

Journalists are now officially catching up to the vaunted knowledge available on the blogosphere from conservative bloggers.

It's Over!

Yes, it's over, so declares ABC News.

The recession is over. At least according to Barry Knapp, a strategist at Barclays Capital who specializes in consulting chicken gizzards and crystal balls... I mean, specializes in interpreting economic data and then spouting really cool phrases like "the sweet spot of the recovery" on national television.

Apparently these Ivy League whiz kids missed the story in the Washington Times yesterday that reported April foreclosures up 32% year-over-year. Some "sweet spot."

It may be over, but "it" ain't the recession we are talking about. What is over is the vaunted veneer of objectivity possessed by the media in relation to the executive branch. Trembling like a 15-year old girl in the presence of the "dreamiest" senior in the school, the press keeps sticking its neck out for a President who has shown nothing but incompetence as of yet.

But remember, you heard it here first - the recession is over! The Messiah has come. The Kingdom is established.

Yawn....

Newsweek Nails It!: Obama is a Marxist!

Out of the mouth of babes and the mainstream media, every once in a while you get profundity.

My uncle reads Newsweek, I don't. So he saved the February 16, 2009 copy for me, and it had THIS on the cover:




Note the self-conscious mockery of actual socialist symbolism:






Now of course, if a Conservative makes this same observation, he is a "right-wing extremist." Everyone from Mike Savage to Sean Hannity to Joe the Plumber to John McCain have been criticized for utilizing the word in connection with The One.

And yes, the story on the inside, written by Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas, ties this "socialism" that "we all are" now to the policy of Barack Hussein Muhammad bin Obama. The story specifically states that Obama is going much further than even the free-spending Bush while "reversing Bill Clinton's end of big government" [sic]. And the article casts its own lot with Obama's spending-like-water goals, asserting (without proof) that "an aging population and global warming and higher energy costs will demand more taxing and spending."

Of course, the story is strangely silent about the fact that the retirement savings of the aging population was wiped out by Democratic social engineering in the housing market, that high energy costs will be caused by Socialist global warming nonsense, and that, well, that global warming is so much Socialist nonsense designed specifically not to respond to a real threat, but rather to put the brakes on the free market and transfer power to national governments and international non-governmental organizations. But all that is beside the point! The good news is, we're all Socialists with the advent of The One.

A moment of honesty (unintended, I am sure) was induldged in by our Newsweek heroes, when they note "The catch [of all this expanding Socialist governance] is that more government intrusion in the economy will almost surely limit growth (as it has in Europe, where a big welfare state has caused chronic high unemployment)." Emphasis added.

The article concludes: "Growth has always been America's birthright and saving grace." But look for that growth to stop, Komrade!

In an adjacent story by Michael Freedman (who seems to barely be able to restrain his orgasmic delight long enough to type his story), the claim is made that the long-term effects of Obama's policies "will be a steady drift toward what could be called a European model of governance, regulation, and paternalism. Already, big government is on the rise - projected public spending figures show the United States will move ever closer to European averages over the next two years." The U.S. government will begin regulating "with big brother vigilance," turning entire industries into "virtual wards of the state." Of course, restraint is not always a good thing, as we learn when Freedman indulges in some journalistic cheerleading, "This is all likely to prove very popular if the conventional wisdom [read: the hopes of the mainstream media elites] is right."

How is that whole hopey-changey thing working out for ya? Oddly enough, all these ideas have been tried before. But rather than being "tried and true," it seems they are "tried and tattered."

Bush, McCain Warned of Economic Crisis; Obama Ignored

Be sure to watch this video before YouTube pulls it!





As far back as the Clinton administration, Republicans, particularly John McCain, and later officials of the George W. Bush administration, warned Democrats of an impending housing market problem due to the politicalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Beginning in April 2001, the Bush administration complained that the size of the two quasi-governmental entities, coupled with a troublesome regulatory environment inherited from the Clinton administration (i.e., the subprime loan initiatives rammed through Congress by Clinton and the Congressional Black Caucus), portended a "potential problem" which could lead to "strong repercussions in financial markets" if not immediately addressed.

In 2003, the Bush administration upgraded its warning concerning the two housing giants to the status of "systemic risk," indicating that problems with the two would likely extend beyond the housing market itself and have a detrimental effect upon the entire American economy. That year, Treasury Secretary John Snow was pushing Congress to more actively exercise its regulatory powers over both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, asking for a regulatory agency that would focus on "the safety and soundness of their activities."

Democratic Congressman Barney Frank (MA), however, who had already placed one of his homosexual lovers, Herb Moses, in a leadership position at Fannie Mae, oddly enough as Assistant Director of Product Initiatives (a position that had direct oversight of subprime lending programs), indignantly insisted to Snow that "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are NOT in a crisis." In fact, Frank insisted that the role of the federal government was to encourage more subprime lending to minority and low-income homebuyers.

Frank said, "The more people... exaggerate the [lack of] safety and soundness, the more people conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see... we see entities [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] which are fundamentally sound financially... and even if there were a problem the federal government doesn't bail them out [HUH?!?!?!?, ed.], ... then the less I think we see in terms of affordable housing." Emphasis added.

In 2005, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan warned, "Enabling these institutions to increase in size - and they will once the crisis in their judgment passes - we are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk." Greenspan specifically tied the potential insolvency of Fannie and Freddie, and consequent meltdown of the financial system, to the lack of a responsible regulatory regime.

John McCain, in a Senate speech in 2006, stated, "For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac... and the sheer magnitude of these GSEs [Government-Sponsored Entities] and the role that they play in the housing market.... [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] need to be reformed without delay."

Once again, the incompetent Marxist social engineering of Democrats has backfired. The housing market crisis that precipitated the wider financial meltdown was wholly the product of the Maoist thinking of Bill Clinton and the Congressional Black Caucus, and was roundly defended by such liberal blunt objects as Barney Frank and Charles Schumer.

Who saw clearly what was happening? Why, of course, those whom the Democrats ignored at the time of their warnings but find the cojones to blame now! George W. Bush, John McCain, Alan Greenspan.... Note, however, that almost as an afterthought, the reporter announces that, on what could have been the most significant legislation on the issue, Obama "did not weigh in."

What are the odds that Obama and his bunkies are going to solve the problem that they were not wise enough to see in the first place, in spite of all the warnings and signs to the contrary?

Not likely.