The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down another 679 points today, closing at 8,579, it’s lowest point in over five years. With a return of negative 19%, President Bush has now surpassed Richard Nixon for the honor claiming the worst performing market this side of Herbert Hoover.
By comparison, the Dow first broke the 8,500 mark way back in June of 1998, under President Bill Clinton.
<insert snappy sarcasm that keeps me from feeling like crap here>
I got nuthin’
One of the problems in comparing presidential performance of the DJIA (as if there was only one!) is being able to compare one-term presidents with multi-term presidents.
We recognize that there are some natural business cycles, and a one-term president might slip betwen the down cycles, making their presidency look more successful than would otherwise occur. Also, a one-term president might benefit more from the policies of his predecessors, and successfully pass of the problems arising from his own policies to the next president.
On the other hand, a one-term president might manage to get hit with a confluence of events resulting from external factors and his predecessor’s policies which make economic performance under his administration look bad, even though he had little to do with it, and the next president might benefit from the “bad-tasting medicine” which the former president has to endure. Personally, I think Carter fits into that mold.
Therefore, it’s hard to judge a one-term president, and even less so for those having less than one term. I would make an exception if the one-term president was following the policies of his predecessor (like Hoover), or if their term is followed by another president from their own party which continues the economic policies of his predecessor (Kennedy/Johnson).
But as long as we are using the DJIA to measure presidential economic performance, a two-term president doesn’t suffer from these problems which might distort results. After all, eight years is longer than many CEOs are given to turn their companies around, after all.
By that standard, the current Bush administration fails on all accounts.
GM is below $5. Five fucking dollars?
Now, some smart Republican tell me how that happened on your watch and is still the Democrats fault?
On Dr Phil today, right now this minute, they are fucking talking about the economy. Dr Phil? I want to hear about the mother who drinks and her kids resent her for sleeping with their best friends married mother who smokes crack and is a “dancer” at Deja Vu.
I need escape.
The next time around it will called “Worse than Bush”.
I don’t even want to think about that. I mean any worse and we are no longer a country.
The prez has very little impact on the stock market, if any at all. What’s important to the market are the 2 primary emotions: fear and greed. When every-one’s greedy, we love the market. When every-one’s fearful, we hate the market and are running for the exits.
We are in a period of fear now because of a collapse in lending standards, initially started by government pressure on lending institutions to lend more money to bad credit risks so those people could buy homes. This helped fuel the building bubble and led to greed-head Wall Streeters to bundle bad mortgages into packages to be sold to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other financial concerns. Fannie and Freddie were asleep at the wheel: they bought whatever crap Wall Street was selling, and Wall Street was selling the bullshit that lenders were passing on. The first domino in the collapse was government and the Community Re-Investment Act, followed by lenders and Wall Streeters who couldn’t wait to get these bad loans (through collateralized mortgage obligations) off of their books. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and a bunch of others bought these pigs-in-pokes. When the borrowers stopped paying (often at the first interest rate re-set) the whole house of cards started to fall.
Weathering this storm will take two years, in my view, and my advice is to hunker-down and ride it out. Those who sit tight and keep investing will be richly rewarded, but it will take some time to get there.
Nixon inherited: the Vietnam mess, the country torn apart, RFK, MLK, riots, debit, inflation Etc.
Bush inherited peace time, no pressing social issues, cheap gas and an economy that even with the tech bubble busting was in pretty good shape.
Bush is way worse than Nixion.
The Republican Party has shot its bolt. With many of its politicians in jail, it can’t claim to be the “law and order” party. After all its sex scandals, it can’t claim to be the “family values” party. With all the racists now hiding out in the GOP, it can’t claim to be Lincoln’s party that freed the slaves. After letting 9/11 happen and the Iraq fiasco, it can’t claim to be better on foreign policy or national security. And any and all claims it ever made to be better on the economy just got blown to hell. When you get right down to it, there’s nothing left, and this party should shrivel up and go away.
AOL straw polls usually tilt toward Republicans because AOL’s subscriber base is more conservative than the country as a whole. That’s what makes these numbers so remarkable:
1. Who do you want to win?
Obama 56%
McCain 40%
Undecided 4%
2. Who do you think will win?
Obama 66%
McCain 30%
Unsure 4%
What this means is the only people who still say McCain will win are the hardcore detached-from-reality wingnuts who comprise 30% or so of the electorate. What it means is there’s not a single person left in the rational segment of the adult population who thinks McCain will be the next president. This is rock bottom, folks; McCain can’t go any lower. And what that means is his campaign is a total, complete, utter failure.
Roger said,
“After letting 9/11 happen…”
So, you think 9/11 was an inside job then, Rog?
7 Maybe they should put on clown make-up and try to pass themselves off as the “slapstick comedy” party.
Actually, I wouldn’t look forward to a one-party system either. Power corrupts, and the Democrats aren’t exactly perfect altruists. Maybe some more reasonable folks will resurrect the bombed-out hulk of the GOP when this is all over and create a party based on true conservatism (which most of the readers of this blog have never seen)….or maybe something else altogether.
@9 Yep, it was a totally made-inside-GOP botch job. Total incompetence, total negligence, total stupidity — and 100% GOP.
9 It’s pretty much of a stretch to claim that the Bush gang, craven as they are, were actively complicit in the planning and execution of 9/11. However, there’s ample evidence to the effect that the then-new administration went through some pretty fancy footwork to avoid responding to the ample warnings that some major terrorist event was coming up. Even disregarding that, the fact that they wantonly exploited the political capital they gained after it happened, could only be disputed by someone with serious cognitive difficulties.
If “Marvin Stamn” responds to this, I rest my case!
@7 “there’s nothing left”
I believe there’s one thing left that you’ve overlooked. The Republican party has now become the party of fear. Palin and McCain work “fear” or “I’m afraid” into nearly every other sentence at their recent and very ugly rallys, where they whup their base into cries of “treason”, terrorist” and “kill him”. Yup, fear what they have left.
Joe Scarborough on MSNBC, he the well known “LIBERAL” (that is sarcasm for you wingnuts), said this afternoon that he expects a veto proof Congress and Senate, thereby giving the next president, Senator Obama, the power to make sweeping changes with no opposition for at least two years.
I like Joe now.
11 & 12,
Well, you guys are in good company. Rosie O’Donnell also believes 9/11 was an inside job, as does a bunch of very, very right wing folks out there on the fringe.
Maybe you all should get together and DL and discuss it. Now that would be quite a conflagration!! Right wing nut-cases agreeing and drinking beer with Neo-socialists. Wow!
@8 “the hardcore detached-from-reality wingnuts who comprise 30% or so of the electorate”
And 100% of our trolls.
No government policy ever forced a bank to take on a bad loan.
Franken is up by 6 in Minnesota!
@5 “started by government pressure on lending institutions to lend more money to bad credit risks so those people could buy homes”
God bless the lending institutions. It’s the damned poor people and their government!
@15 You’re misrepresenting what I said. I don’t buy the conspiracy theories that the Busheviks planned and carried out the attack. I’ve never said that, and I don’t believe that. All I said was they let it happen through incompetence, negligence, and stupidity.
@5 Well if the government pressured banks to make bad loans then it was a Republican government that did it.
@16: I believe that the rabbit said something very different from 9/11 being an inside job. He said it was negligence and incompetence. I am not sure I agree completely, but the facts are that when Bush came into office he de-emphasized the threat from bin Laden and al qaida specifically because it was the main thrust for Clinton. Bush was more concerned with old cold war leftovers and other foreign policy areas. In fact, richard Clark warned the bush adminsitration about bin laden and was told it was not a high priority area. Whether or not the de-emphasis led to us missing the signs of the attack (such as the FBI ignoring the field agent from minnesota about the muslim radicals computer or the muslims in flying school or the Presidential daily briefing that warned of an attack by hijacking an airplane) is not clear. But a vigilant, attentive and aware administration MIGHT have been able to prevent the attacks of 9/11. The Bush administration was NOT, however, a vigilant attentive or aware administration and it was NOT a priority for them precisely because it WAS a priority for the leaving Clinton administration.
@19 – oops – you said it too.
Speaking of ugly McCain rallies, the media are getting more willing to call bullshit on McCain and Palin, as illustrated by this Associated Press story:
“WAUKESHA, Wis. -Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Thursday that questions about Democratic rival Barack Obama’s association with a former war protester linked to Vietnam-era bombings are part of a broader issue of honesty.
” … McCain told supporters that Obama had not been truthful in describing his relationship with former radical William Ayers. …
“Loud cheers … greeted McCain’s attacks over Ayers, who helped found … a Vietnam protest group that bombed government buildings 40 years ago. Obama has noted that he was a child at the time and first met Ayers and his wife, ex-radical Bernadine Dohrn, a quarter-century later.
“‘Look, we don’t care about an old, washed-up terrorist and his wife,’ McCain said. ‘That’s not the point here. … “We need to know the full extent of the relationship’ …. Later, McCain told ABC News: ‘It’s a factor about Sen. Obama’s candor and truthfulness with the American people.’
“Obama has denounced Ayers and his violent actions and views. … The Associated Press and other news organizations have reported that Obama and Ayers, now a college professor who lives in Obama’s Chicago neighborhood, are not close but that they worked together on two nonprofit organizations from the mid-1990s to 2002. In addition, Ayers hosted a small meet-the-candidate event for Obama in 1995 as he first ran for the state Senate. …
“Obama’s history with Ayers was explored during the primaries in news reports and in a campaign debate. …
” … [T]he McCain campaign also released a 90-second Web ad about Obama and Ayers. ‘Barack Obama and domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. Friends. They’ve worked together for years,’ the ad says. The ad also claims that one of the nonprofits on which Obama and Ayers worked was a radical education foundation.
“That educational foundation was The Annenberg Challenge. It was funded by the Annenberg Foundation, a charity set up by longtime Republican backer and newspaper publisher Walter Annenberg. Annenberg has died, but his wife has endorsed McCain this year. …
“McCain and his campaign have sought to raise doubts about Obama …. Supporters have used Obama’s middle name, Hussein, … trying to remind voters that he shares a name with deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The … move … also plays to Internet rumors that Obama is a Muslim, even though he grew up in a secular household and is a Christian. …
“McCain also repeated the false claim that Palin opposed the so-called Bridge to Nowhere, for which she campaigned in her race for governor and accepted federal money to build. When the project drew national scorn as an example of wasteful spending, Congress withdrew its support for the bridge but Alaska kept the money for other projects.”
(Quoted under fair use.)
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Perhaps the media are finally beginning to understand that facts and fabrications are not that same, and that a reporter’s job is to report facts — not just put quote marks around lies. At any rate, stories like this give me hope that journalists are finally coming back to life and know what their job is. Perhaps they even knew all along. Better late than never.
re 5: So, poor people who tried to buy houses broke the ‘free market’?
Sooooooooooooooooo……. Someone’s gotta take the fall for this disaster, and it’s the poor people who tried to buy houses? That’s your assessment? Because, obviously, the president and his administration and the Republican house and senate are blameless.
You are an incoherent dickhead.
For those who think we Democrats are rejoicing because the economy is doing so badly – forget it. We are the ones who will have to clean up after the Republican party is over and the drunks have all been sent home.
What we are feeling is mostly sadness at the sad state to which our company has been driven, mixed with anger at those responsible, and relief that it will soon be over.
Yes, that’s the comical Republican meme: Poor people — who own nothing and have no power — brought down the economy. Welcome to Saturday morning Kiddie Kartoons! Now shaddup and buy our sugar-coated cereal!
It says a lot that McCain was too much of a coward to mention Ayers in the debate – but he is throwing around innuendo and having Palin (who sleeps with a traitor) saying it over and over on their campaign.
they want to turn the issue from the economy and they have nothing else so they are going for this tenuous connection to Ayers. How sad and desperate.
Correction to # 25: “company” should be “country”.
The Ayers claims show just how desparate the McCain campaign really is. You’d think they could find something more substantial, some writings somewhere they could quote out of context, or some other “real” friendship. But they’ve got nothing, so they have to make something up out of whole cloth.
If you think that Bush is the worst everything since Nixon, wait ’til you get a load of McCain.
That’s incompetence we can believe in!
Whatever happened to our trolls? No talking points in the inbox? Run out of stupid things to say? Drink the wrong Kool-Aid?
3 MLF
I could introduce you to a married mother who smokes crack and is a “dancer” at Deja Vu. It’ll cost ya, though.
Why do John McCain and Sarah Palin hate this country so much? We all know their Administration would lead to the end of The Great American Experiment, that their Administration would compel us to third world status. Watch Mad Max movies to see where McCain/Palin would take us. Yet, they continue their pursuit of the White House. Why? Because the ambition of these two is so unbridled, so blind, so fuck you, that the nation really doesn’t count. God help us.
From what I hear, there’s some relief in the Pentagon with the diminished prospects of a McCain presidency. McCain bullied generals and admirals throughout his career in the Senate, he seemed to want to get even with them for the “lack of respect” he received while he was in the service.
The “lack of respect” was because he didn’t perform very well but kept getting promoted because his father and his grandfather were high-ranking admirals. But just as Bush was “born on third base and thought he hit a triple”, McCain thought he was a good officer. His superiors, however, thought he was barely adequate, but McCain played the POW card to the hilt to keep him from suffering any real consequences of sub-par performance.
Eventually McCain simply got to the spot where he simply couldn’t be promoted anymore. His value as a congressional liason had run his course, his father was long-since retired, and nobody was willing to take responsibility for giving him a higher command. McCain’s infidelity was an open secret within the fishbowl of the Pentagon. While the military isn’t known for being particularly virginal, having an affair while married was still a crime in the military, shows a lack of judgement and inability to control oneself, and can be a career-killer for a higher-rankking officer.
Since McCain wasn’t going to be promoted, he was going to be subjet to the “up or out” rule of the military, and he knew it. Time for a new career. He soon “fell in love” with a rich heiress from a politically-connected family, and his alternative political career was born. He divorced his wife (the one who had raised his kids alone while he was a POW) shortly before marrying Cindy McCain. His new career as a politician was now ready.
But he would never forget the admirals and generals in the Pentagon who didn’t think he was good enough to sit among them. He felt he was smarter and better than all of them. And serving on the Senate Armed Services Committee, he let them know that, and he browbeat those who didn’t agree with them, and carried grudges against those who opposed his efforts. Those grudges became legendary withint he Pentagon, as he went out of his way to stop promotions and derail careers of any who stood in his way.
Between McCain and Rumsfield, it became very hard to find a competent general or admiral who had the balls to stand up to a politician who was determined to mis-use the military.
@31 I predict the trolls will be in hiding the Morning After.
31
I must admit I miss them. I miss them much like the old schoolmarm would have to admit at the end of the day that unless she had a few dolts in her class, she just didn’t feel that useful. Oh, well, I guess if all we get is reasoned, temperate, fact-based discussions around here, we’ll all learn to live with that.
When Kathleen Parker posts a little truth at Townhall.com these days, she experiences the wing-nut hate first hand.
http://townhall.com/columnists.....ments=true
Yay,
The PI endorsed Goldmark!
P-I Endorsement: Elect Goldmark
Washington state needs bolder environmental leadership in the management of its forests and shorelines. Farsighted strategies also might provide better economic returns for the educational institutions and counties that depend on revenues from the land.
Democratic challenger Peter Goldmark is the clear choice for state Commissioner of Public Lands. Goldmark, an Eastern Washington farmer, offers a good bet for more careful environmental stewardship, especially on timber lands, a willingness to spur clean-energy production and a good sense for the fiduciary responsibility to earn money from timber, leasing aquatic lands and other activities.
Goldmark is seeking to unseat incumbent Doug Sutherland, a solid public servant who stabilized the department’s operations. Sutherland steers an environmental course that is not backward looking but also is far from innovative. After eight years, we don’t see that changing.
Neither Goldmark or Sutherland, who is heavily supported by the timber industry, is likely to try to make a big shift from logging. But we think Goldmark would be much more open to stricter conservation practices, extensive marketing of timber as green-certified to the highest standard and moving rapidly in new directions. His enthusiasm for clean energy, for instance, suggests he is also likely to spur conservation groups, businesses and others into partnerships that will make for a healthier environment and economy.
32:
I want to just watch them on TV. Makes me forget about the economy and war and that Palin Pig w/lipstick.
37
I can’t believe that when a conservative columnist does not tow the company line that the rank and file can be so vicious.
Typical Republican response. Our way or the highway.
Here is my favorite comment from a wingnut about Kathleen Parkers column.
This shows what Republicans really think of women.
Kathleen Parker wrote this about the response to her column suggesting Palin was in over head.
You can read the whole column here. Very enlightning. The Trolls go after anyone who is not in lockstep.
http://tinyurl.com/4tj5dj
@ 5
We are in a period of fear now because of a collapse in lending standards, initially started by government pressure on lending institutions to lend more money to bad credit risks so those people could buy homes.
How many times do we have to debunk that bullshit before you guys stop repeating it?
Looks like the Palin investigation has happened. They investigated themselves – and guess what? Not guilty by reason of we investigated ourselves – like anyone will believe that. Of course, in the meantime, they are trying to smear the real investigation…
From the AP
Yup, the McCain-Palin ticket is bringing real reform. From now on, if anyone in gov’mint is in trouble, they will investigate themselves. What a great precedent to set!
This ticket would make Alberto Gonzalez proud!
34 Like Rumsfeld, whose military experience was as an Air Force flight instructor in peacetime, McCain is likely to suffer from “flyboy syndrome”: a misconception that any war can be won primarily by controlling the airspace and dropping a sufficient number of bombs. One conflict after another has shown that this is false, and that regardless of the “crater count”, it’s up to the grunts on the ground to get the job done.
Actually, the Community Re-Investment Act was passed during Carter’s term, but Clinton started forcing the banks to really, really make loans under the CRA.
24 & 26 – Yes, poor people took on loans they could not afford, and the banks lent them the money to get “CRA points.” I even remember some bankers I know discussing how a loan they were considering might count for their bank as a “CRA loan.”
Are the poor to blame? Yes, they did an unwise and irresponsible thing because government was greasing the skids with lenders to induce the poor to buy homes they could not afford. Republicans and Democratic administrations were both to blame here.
42 – There is nothing in my statement that your quoted in your post that you can debunk. Your precious government encouraged/forced lenders to make loans to bad credit risks. The poor people who got the loans couldn’t make the payments. Meanwhile, these toxic loans were bundled-up and sold to Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and other financial interests. After a short while, the dominoes started to fall. You know the rest.
Government and greedy folks in the lending and financial sectors are responsible for this current financial mess. We’re near the capitulation stage now, so it’s time to start buying. It will take a couple of years, but a buy now will pay off handsomely in the future.
PI @ 45: Actually, there is quite a lot of your statement that can be debunked.
First of all, CRA loans make up a small fraction of the banking market. The loans are low down payment, but come with the usual requirements that extra efforts need to be made to ensure stable income sources, etc. before the loan is granted. In practice, CRA loans didn’t have a default rate any greater than that experienced by banks for non-CRA loans.
Secondley, CRA applies only to BANKS. During the Bush administration one of the big changes was the rapid rise of mortgage firms not covered by banking regulations. Before the crash, they handled 2/3 of the new mortgages in the U.S. They didn’t issue ANY CRA loans. And it was the mortgage firms who had the biggest percentage of defaulting loans.
Given these facts, which are well known to most Republican insiders who utter them, I think there is more than a little bit of a racist element to these charges that the CRA caused the economic problems. It’s a blatant attempt to blame the economic crisis on all those “people of color” whom the “poor bankers” were forced to lend to, who couldn’t be trusted to be responsible enough to buy a house within their means or to pay their bills on time. To those within the Republican base, they will understand the imagry and the code words.
If you want to blame the problem on the individuals buying the houses, you are much more likely to find examples of upper-middle class Republicans trying to strike it rich by flipping homes within 30 days for a quick profit.
But ultimately the cause of the problem lies with the mortgage bankers & brokers who went for the quick buck rather than protect their firms by reasonable application of prudent lending standards, and the current Bush administration for negligence in it’s oversight responsibilities (observing the changing market conditions and taking appropriate action to protect the integrety of the market as a whole).