Nearly alone among progressives, I supported the bank bailout in the waning days of the 2008 presidential campaign and defended the stimulus package in early 2009. While people bitched and complained about unworthy banks getting a life-line from the taxpayers, I told you that it was going to save you from losing all your savings and help get the economy back on track. No one wants to bail out crooks, but in the system we have there isn’t much choice. That’s why the the financial reforms that (hopefully) pass later this year are going to be the real test of whether we’ve learned anything and are prepared to takes steps to change the system we have so we don’t just have a repeat of the problems that caused the economic meltdown in the first place. There are still very serious problems in our economy, including an ongoing commercial real estate problem, a home foreclosure crisis that isn’t going away, and very high unemployment. But we didn’t lose all our savings and the markets are working again.
The political consensus may be that President Barack Obama’s handling of the economy has been weak. The judgment of money in all its forms has been overwhelmingly positive, and that may be the more lasting appraisal.
One year after U.S stocks hit their post-financial-crisis low on March 9, 2009, the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has risen more than 68 percent, and it’s up more than 41 percent since Obama took office. Credit spreads have narrowed. Commodity prices have surged. Housing prices have stabilized.
“We’ve had a phenomenal run in asset classes across the board,” said Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist for Miller Tabak & Co. in New York. “If he was a Republican, we would hear a never-ending drumbeat of news stories about markets voting in favor of the president.”
The economy has also strengthened beyond expectations at the time Obama took office. The gross domestic product grew at a 5.9 percent annual pace in the fourth quarter, compared with a median forecast of 2.0 percent in a Bloomberg survey of economists a week before Obama’s Jan. 20, 2009, inauguration. The median forecast for GDP growth this year is 3.0 percent, according to Bloomberg’s February survey of economists, versus 2.1 percent for 2010 in the survey taken 13 months earlier.
I just think it’s worth reminding people what they got in return for the bailouts.
great post. i agree this a major accomplishment for Obama, how frustrating for him that it’s so difficult to tout!
1) it’s hard to win people over by talking about how much worse things would have / could have been. kind of an awkward point to make, especially because 2) things are already so miserable for so many people, it’s difficult for them to believe that things could be worse and that Obama’s actions spared them of that.
my hope for 2010 and 2012 is that Obama and the Crats figure out how to showcase their many accomplishments and banish this false narrative that they haven’t done anything.
it’s especially difficult to tout when your own base thinks you’ve sold out to corporate interests. I’d say that things could have been handled better and I wish we could have wrapped up health care last summer so we could get going on the financial reforms, but he and his team did an outstanding job overall. Unfortunately, so much more needs to be done and they’ve used up the capital they need to do it.
there’s a distinction that a lot of the base misses, methinks. I’m not sure what one could point to as solid evidence Obama has sold out to corporate interests, the record just doesn’t support that. the key distinction is that Obama and the Administration are forced to wrangle a Congress that is demonstrably in the pocket of Corporate America in order to get anything big done.
someone somewhere commented recently that Obama and Co need to occasionally highlight the difficulties they face dealing with Congress and the degree to which Congressional Corruption waters down Obama’s efforts. i am sympathetic to this idea, but in reality that sort of communication would make it impossible for Obama to work with Congress at all. Obama just can’t take such a harsh adversarial stance against Congress and still accomplish things.
finally, it’s going to be hard to get much of anything big done in this country until the money in politics is seriously addressed in a progressive manner, and it’s frustrating to feel Bush’s influence continue to taint the Laws of this land via the Supreme Court.
I don’t ask this to be contrarian, but What accomplishments? They saved the whales…someplace maybe. All these dystopian fantasies from the bailout- and banker-lovers of 2012-like global destruction if the thieves didn’t get their welfare checks is just too much apologism for me to bear.
I read politics everyday and I don’t remember reading even ONE quantifiable, major success, other than marginalizing and demonizing anyone to the left of John McCain.
Oh, I have one accomplishment from the Obama Administration: they managed to make George Bush look resolute and principled.
link
Won’t address it all. Just three for now.
Passed a tax cut so small that most Americans don’t even know they got it.
Raised fuel standards so more people could buy Toyotas and kill themselves.
For the first time in 100 years of trying forced every American to buy crappy insurance from vultures who will revel in guaranteed sales with no price controls. Way to go Barack Bush.
“Raised fuel standards so more people could buy Toyotas and kill themselves.”
What is this, a joke? You’re really grasping at straws, and it’s kind of shameful if this is your argument. It makes you seem so desperate to knock Obama that you’re unconcerned with even making a point, any point.
Yeah, it was a weak complaint. Seriously, I don’t think fuel standards have any effect on total oil use. They are just a feel good thing. If they have any effect, it’s to encourage the purchase of foreign cars. And don’t thell me they are made in the USA. Assembled in union free Southern plants by Republicans from foreign parts is not made in America. With all apologies to TarHeelDem, I don’t think of the South as part of the USA at all. It’s more like Guatemala or El Salvador.
From the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act:
Ask the people you work with if they know they had a tax cut. Bush was smarter, his was smaller but he gave it in one lump rebate. People noticed that. They don’t notice a few bucks more or less each week, especially if they are working variable hours.
Also, tax cuts pale compared with $6,000 to $12,000 a year in mandatory insurance costs. Here in Illinois, the absolute minimum for a healthy young person is $500 a month and that’s a 50-50 policy with a big out of pocket limit. And those of us fortunate enough to have good employer insurance will pay hundreds per month in health insurance tax. Sure it doesn’t start for four years, but do you want to bet that any decent policy will be over $25,000 then? 44% of $25,000 is … I shudder to think about it. Obama AND the union leaders sold us out on this one and the rank and file know it. Doesn’t affect me personally, I’ll be on pure Medicare by then. But if I had known this was his plan, I would have voted for Hilary and stayed home in November. Couldn’t bring myself to vote for Mccain. Romney maybe but never McCain or a ticket with Palin on it. I wonder if this wasn’t just a big corporate farce to set up, “Heads you lose and Tails you’re really screwed.”
It’s an issue of objective fact, either there was a tax cut or there wasn’t. And there was. Whether people notice it is an entirely different issue.
Politically, it makes all the difference. And appearance counts more in politics than objective fact otherwise Al Gore would have been President from 2000 to 2008.
Point taken, but there’s another side to it. I know most Republicans don’t follow this simple rule, but in the reality-based community, in order to get people to notice something, that something has to actually exist. Now there is the separate problem of making people aware of it. But I believe it would be a much tougher problem to convince people that they received a major tax cut, had there not actually been one. A sizable number of Americans (hardline wingnuts, tea partiers) will never believe it anyway.
In America, people who will never have more than a $400,000 estate and that only if they manage to pay off their house, worry about taxing 70% of estates over $10,000,000 because that’s “not fair”. They believe they can fight off an oppressive state that has tanks, predator drones and machine guns with their cherished handguns. They want their kids off drugs but bolt down a six-pack every night. They want their daughters virginal but their sons to sleep around and no, that definitely doesn’t mean they want their sons to be gay or bi. They want balanced budgets but no one should pay taxes.
In a reality-based world you are probably right, but America is definitely not reality-based. It’s more like fantasy-based.
Maybe, but economically it wouldn’t have.
Huh?! This list is a suspicious and looks like Rahm Emanual wrote it himself on his Hello Kitty stationery. Where are the major initiatives? Any democrat (small “d”) would have done all of that. (How can Obama prohibit federal <key word> lobbyists to serve on important <key word> boards when his Chief of Staff is an unabashed lobbyist? I’d consider the Obama Administration a very “important” “federal” board.)
I really am not trying to be a nudge but I would consider myself an average voter. I don’t sip tea while musing about interest rates and watching cable “news” all day because I don’t have the time and I have bills to pay. I work 40 hours per day and I don’t own a personal computer and I don’t have cable.
One question: If I, a real current events junkie with little discretionary income, honestly cannot name a major success from this administration, then what are other “hopers and changers” thinking? All I see is Obama floundering hither and yon, begging for bipartisanship, embracing and actually making bipartisan consensus the worst abuses of the Republicans, tinkering with No Child, Gitmo is still going strong, so is torture and rendition. (Do you really believe that no torture is going on in those black sites? The military is already exploiting Obama’s weakness and rolls him hourly.) Also, his nominations are still blocked. He really doesn’t want single-payer or a public option. And let’s not start on his lack of strongly defined stance on ANYTHING UNDER THE SUN.
PS: Did you really use the term “New Way Forward”? The only thing missing was the xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo. Is beginning something now an accomplishment? The bar lowers more and more every day.
The reason you can’t “name a success” has a lot more to do with your emotional reactions and a lot less to do with facts of the case. You have chosen, chosen, to ignore plenty of important accomplishments, because you are obviously frustrated that Obama didn’t turn the world into Candy Land immediately upon entering office.
Perhaps it’s worth reassessing just how realistic your expectations are, and just how tainted your contentions are by raw emotion? We all make arguments from emotion from time to time, but you can do a lot of harm when you allow your worldview to be determined by anger and ignore the facts.
If you want to be pissed off at somethingorother no matter what actually transpires in the real world, seek out your local Tea Party.
Trying to be an ass about it is really the way to go, right. You’re responding with quite the emotion also. Still, you haven’t addressed anything I’ve said.
He made Bush look resolute and principled? Really? You gotta either be drunk, high, or a troll. Obama’s greatest flaw is his excessive sticking to his principles when some dirty politics, Chicago-style, is called for.
I’m sorry but this is just nonsense. I’ve had (still have) some frustrations with Obama, but you really have to ignore large swaths of reality to make an argument like this.
“Apologism,” seriously? Myself and most of the people I read on this blog are plenty willing to criticize Obama and his team when appropriate, though reasonable folks can disagree as to when it’s appropriate. But to suggest that simply saying the Administration has accomplished things makes one an apologist, it’s hard to take that seriously.
(This was in reply to Delonjo)
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DES MOINES, Iowa – Tom Taormina is 65 and has no retirement savings. The Virginia City, Nev., business consultant said it’s not for lack of trying. He and his wife, Midge, have tried to save and at one time invested in the stock market, but it’s all been depleted.
“We’re scrambling to make it through the next 20 years,” he said. “We’re doing everything we can to set money aside, but every time we do something unforeseen comes up.”
…
A new survey released by the Employee Benefit Research Institute shows the percentage of workers who say they’ve saved for retirement slid to 69 percent in January, down from 75 percent in 2009.
Perhaps more alarming is the increasing number of workers who say they have little or no retirement savings.
The trend is largely the result of the financial markets dragging account levels down and some workers tapping into the accounts after they or their spouse lost a job, EBRI’s research director Jack VanDerhei said.
MORE PEOPLE HAVE NO SAVINGS AT ALL
An increased percentage of workers report they have virtually no savings and investments. Among RCS workers providing this type of information, 27 percent say they have less than $1,000 in savings (up from 20 percent in 2009).
In total, more than half of workers (54 percent) report that the total value of their household’s savings and investments, excluding the value of their primary home and any defined benefit plans, is less than $25,000.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."it’s not that 401(k)’s are depleted. It’s that they’ve been stagnant earners for the last decade. And people are tapping into that money to make ends meet because of unemployment.
They’re tapping the money even if they are employed sometimes. I was with you at the time but I’ve been swayed to the nihilistic destruction of open left. Looking at the situation of the bills it’s clear that it’s going to be diluted to nothing just in time for the commercial paper crash. The only way to pass the reforms was to ram them down the throats of the congress by fear mongering the shit out of them as the economy went up in a blazing inferno behind them to spur them on.
I now see it as a choice between no regulation and destruction and regulation.
Gee! They should have put their SS contributions into the stock market. Then they would be fine. /snark
Totally agreed with you then, totally agree with you now.
However, sometimes, my cynical side wants to cut my nose off to spite my face, and I wish we let the entire economic system collapse; only because I think we need a new foundation.
Still, I’m not willing to allow that amount of human suffering to take place in order for that to happen.
Anyway, good post. Regarding financial reform, I still think there’s a chance it can be made good. When it comes to the CFPA, if we have the chance at passing it with it being housed in the Fed, we should take it immediately, no questions asked, and pass it immediately. I swear to God if there’s a long drawn out debate over that, we’re going to lose it altogether, and I think if designed properly, the Fed would be a good place for it anyway.
“However, sometimes, my cynical side wants to cut my nose off to spite my face, and I wish we let the entire economic system collapse; only because I think we need a new foundation.”
I hate to admit it aloud, but I’ve had the same thoughts. But not because we need a a new foundation, but to show folks what would have happened if we allowed the banks to go under.
Yes, that too. However, we’ve already seen what happens, and it doesn’t convince anyone of anything. I mean, you have asshats out there arguing regulation caused the crisis; or that Fannie/Freddie did.History would just get revised anyway, which is why I see it as moot.
I can barely balance my checking, but it shouldn’t take a PhD in economics to explain to folks how the average citizen’s long-term economic health is tied to the economic health of the markets. I was astounded to hear union workers in my own family railing against bank bailouts without any understanding that their pensions, one of the primary reasons for being unionized, is tied to the banks and Wall Street. They seem to think that because they paid their union dues that money is guaranteed no matter what. It’s not as simple as you get back what you put in. What you put in has to be invested in order for everyone to be paid.
Folks suffer from the same economic ignorance about social security. This statistic may have changed, but the average retiree exhausts the full amount paid into social security in less than 10 years after retirement. After that, it’s complete entitlement like welfare. But God forbid non-wealthy Americans accept that at some point in all our lives, if we live long enough, we’re all going to be recipients of a government handout.
I for one am glad to see the numbers on my quarterly retirement savings statements go from small and red to bold and green again.
I just hope for your sake that it’s not a mirage .. soon to disappear again
Your family is right, though, that they have been the victims of thieves, and the thieves have been rewarded while those who gave them their money are left hanging. I think it was a failure on Obama’s part that he didn’t couple the bailouts with criminal prosecution of the big bank CEOs and immediate measures to prevent “to big to fail” from ever being an excuse for larceny again.
it’s hard to calm big investors and foreign lenders when you are on a prosecutorial warpath. He should have pivoted by now to focusing on the crooks and the reforms, but health care delays have held him up.
You’ve really seen indications that he intends to prosecute the crooks and end “too big to fail”? I haven’t. Some rhetoric, yes, but it sure looks like he sees the economy’s root-level systemic failure as something a little technocrat diddling can make right. I’ll change my mind when I see Steagall-Glass, or something very like it, restored and federal agents knocking on the doors of the CEOs of Goldman, AIG, Lehman, Citi, and the rest.
But, Boo, that’s what I believe his voters wanted and needed to see. This country was on the precipice of turning to a bright, new page, but I guess being congenial is far more important than the Rule of Law. I feel betrayed because I fell for All That Jazz about new ways forward and turning the page and hope and change and blah blah blah. But there wasn’t even one token arrest. Not one even token scolding at least. Nothing but more soothing bromides and platitudes about holding the market’s and shareholders’ hands. And now, because Obama not only let the thieves off scot-free, he paid them billions of dollars of our money and, in the tradition of comity and–let’s say it together–bipartisanship, tacitly told all the thieves that they can write as many checks to themselves as they want. What other impression did the bankers get when he hired thieves like Geithner, Rubin, and Summers to guard the store? The message to them was sent loud and clear. I got the message, too.
I kept hearing about the “gathering threat” of Saddam Hussein many years ago. Now I keep hearing about how Obama’s bailout saved the world from annihilation and soup lines. I didn’t fall for it then and I am not about to fall for the fearmongering now, even from my political better-thinkers and allies.
Boo, it’s great that you can be very detached and erudite about this subject. I don’t understand how you can do that but I admire it. I still disagree with the burning heat of a thousand suns. But that’s just my emotions getting the better of me again.
Thank you for corresponding with me. I know that I annoy you but I really am an average, angry voter who is watching Obama turn into the blandest president I’ve ever seen, including Carter.
Booman Tribune ~ A Little Reminder
and here neatly summarised is the mother of all moral hazards.
without reliable good faith and respect for a social pact, this is the counterfeit printing press that got away with it since the great depression, because the raw materials were abundant enough to indulge a growing population with the most profligately wasteful and ecologically destructive lifestyles this planet has ever been asked to endure.
corporations with the rights of people, but none of the inhibitions or responsibilities real people have to cope with, were able to corner and manipulate macroeconomics, invent cowboy casino capitalism, and dumb down the populace with enough chemicals to believe that the worldview from within the media hologram was a, no the correct and only rational, sensible one.
while corporations were ripping and whipping commodities out of the ground, water and air, some of the profits were sprinkled on the old, through their pension funds assisting blowing up the various bubbles that characterise boom’n’bust economies, rigged to be that way to facilitate more plunder of the commons by the few at the expense of the race’s very future.
by this arrangement all were made complicit in the imperial over-reach, by the simple human need for care and attention in one’s dotage.
all were thus invested in rooting for leviathan, for simple dignities that were provided more or less for free by societies with less material goods, but still alive to their humanity in ways most westerners, born entitled to privilege, have left by the wayside, conditioned by the last few generations’ attainment of powers, most notably nuclear, whose existence was undreamed of for the relatively static preceding centuries.
it’s a lot harder to make someone see a simple truth if his livelihood and sense of honour depend on his turning a blind eye.
this is why it’s so hard to wake up a slumbering populace to reality, because to do so would bring the whole temple down, the psychic earthquake would shake confidence in the system many ancestors and family members have died, hearts pumped with patriotism, propaganda, and simple faith in leaders, to protect.
and without confidence, the whole ball of wax can melt so swiftly, as the last crisis intimated.
so confidence is peddled as a given, yet many are looking into the abyss of a penury whose bite has been slowly forgotten since the times just before our living ancestors were born.
until this gordian knot between corporations, (willing to betray the very workers who for generations built their wealth), and the paid servant millionaire club who do their political bidding is severed, why would this situation change until the last blood diamond, the last cancer nostrum, the last bucket of oil, the last broken child worker’s sweat has been transacted into some uber-ghoul’s profitable enterprise? the mightiest armed forces in history are standing behind the institutions that stand for that, while making noises that claim much more noble and lofty goals.
what would be the sword sharp enough to do so?
perhaps enough humans awakening at once, their will focused, and their ignorant, narcoleptically apathetic patience exhausted, demanding the investment of their and their childrens’ lives be directed into bettering peoples’ lives starting at home, instead of worsening others’ abroad, earning their rage as blowback, then punishing them for that, etc etc?
building, even using little old chinese ladies’ life savings if necessary, a world built on co-operation, and win-win solutions, clean energy production, efficient, sustainable infrastructure? could that common sense be universal enough to get effective agreement even between peoples of utterly inimical ideologies?
i’m betting yes, no need for pitchforks, just clear consensus.
bring it on.
While people bitched and complained about unworthy banks getting a life-line from the taxpayers, I told you that it was going to save you from losing all your savings and help get the economy back on track.
Lose savings where? Savings accounts? 401(k)’s? If you think this rally hasn’t been goosed by easy money from the Fed/Treasury, you are dreaming. Also, you realize what we are doing, right? Repeating what the Japanese did. And as you know, that’s a prescription for the fast track back to economic health.
I only had about five thousand in the bank (Citibank). Even if FDIC failed, that’s not much to lose. In exchange for saving my five gees, I get to subsidize a bunch of crooked sharks with millions of dollars in bonuses. I would have rather have lost it and seen them go to jail.
The part that sticks in the craw is that there is no either/or here. Saving the FDIC does not conflict with ridding the body economic of its most malignant parasites.
Stop selling wolf tickets.
Wolf tickets?
most of us who opposed the bailout opposed the no-strings attached part of it, not the “saving the economy”part of it. And i still do.
i am glad the economy is [sort of] working again, but if i were you, Booman, I would hold off on that victory lap: CRE is a timebomb waiting to go off, and it is true that the banks used taxpayer money to give themselves massive bonuses. And somehow I suspect that people with a lot more credibility when it comes to matters of economics are going to disagree with you.
I’ll also add that if the economy is on the mend, it sure doesn’t have many jobs to show for it.
I’d remind you that almost all of the participants have paid back the money in full. Obama intends to impose a fee to get back the remainder.
So, he saved the financial system, got most of the money back, and the stock market is back from losing nearly half its worth. He also saved the American car manufacturing sector. So, where’s the love?
Obama intends to be all things to everybody but in the end becomes nothing at all.
also interesting.
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Right direction 38% – Wrong direction 56%. Only clear support for handling the Iraq and Aghan wars. Approval rating President Obama 53% – 46%. Congress at all time low of 22% – 76%. Democrats in Congress 36% – 61%. Republicans in Congress 30% – 67%. The economy and jobs are rated the most important.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I agree that the bailouts, in some form, were necessary. Or maybe I should say I’ve bought into the claims of those who say they were. I think the main cause of the cross-ideological anger is precisely a sense that the administration and Congress are not nearly as interested in a long-term and radical cure as they were in the short-term crisis response. Even if we agree with that response, there’s no way anybody paying attention doesn’t feel like a victim and a patsy — not without good reason. The situation called for full-out populist ropes and pitchforks and we got MBA tinkering instead.
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Danny Schechter, blogger in chief at Mediachannel.Org, and author of the 2008 book, PLUNDER: Investigating Our Economic Calamity, attended the Make Markets Be Markets Conference, reports that Wall Street financial giants have quietly paid out $430 billion in damages and settlements in over 1500 civil lawsuits …
Global Crisis? Forbes states 218 new billionaires
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."