Compare when Bush took office to when he left.
Compare when Obama took office to now.
No comparison.
Bush took office on January 2001. There was a recession on March 2001. Was that Bush's fault? No, it was Clinton's fault. Clinton left Bush with nothing but a bursting bubble.
Is the current recession Bush's fault? No, it is Clinton's fault:
"President Clinton's tenure was characterized by economic prosperity and financial deregulation, which in many ways set the stage for the excesses of recent years. Among his biggest strokes of free-wheeling capitalism was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, a cornerstone of Depression-era regulation. He also signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit-default swaps from regulation. In 1995 Clinton loosened housing rules by rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act, which put added pressure on banks to lend in low-income neighborhoods. It is the subject of heated political and scholarly debate whether any of these moves are to blame for our troubles, but they certainly played a role in creating a permissive lending environment."
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877351_1877350_1877322,00.html
Is Obama doing anything about this? Tell me, what has Obama done to regulate credit-default swaps?
Unlike any other president,
Bill Clinton was warned ahead of time of the worst recession in US history since the great depression. He was told what to do to prevent it too: to regulate "Derivatives, swaps, basically bets between companies and banks, laying off risk."
BROOKSLEY BORN: "We're trying to protect the money of the American public, which is at risk in these markets."
Nobody, including Clinton, listened and thus the worse recession in history since the great depression started on his watch, in
1998.
"Long-Term Capital Management did business with nearly everyone important on Wall Street. Indeed, much of LTCM's capital was composed of funds from the same financial professionals with whom it traded.
As LTCM teetered, Wall Street feared that Long-Term's failure could cause a chain reaction in numerous markets, causing catastrophic losses throughout the financial system. After LTCM failed to raise more money on its own, it became clear it was running out of options.
On September 23, 1998, Goldman Sachs, AIG, and Berkshire Hathaway offered then to buy out the fund's partners for $250 million, to inject $3.75 billion and to operate LTCM within Goldman's own trading division. The offer was stunningly low to LTCM's partners because at the start of the year their firm had been worth $4.7 billion. Warren Buffett gave Meriwether less than one hour to accept the deal; the time period lapsed before a deal could be worked out. Seeing no options left
the Federal Reserve Bank of New York organized a bailout of $3.625 billion by the major creditors to avoid a wider collapse in the financial markets."
http://www.propublica.org/article/former-clinton-official-says-democrats-obama-advisers-share-blame-for-markehttp://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/etc/script.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooksley_Born#Born_and_the_OTC_Derivatives_Markethttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management#1998_bailoutThus the great recession of 1998 was delayed until 2008. Thank you, Bill Clinton!
BROOKSLEY BORN: "It was my worst nightmare coming true. Nobody really knew what was going on in the market. The toxic assets of many of our biggest banks are over-the-counter derivatives and caused the economic downturn that made us lose our savings, lose our jobs, lose our homes. It was very frightening."
And what's Obama doing about regulating derivatives, credit-default swaps? Absolutely nothing. Stay tuned for the next great recession, which will be even worse than this one. Thank you, Barack Hussein Obama!
