Warning signs on the horizon...

December 21, 2000 6:48 PM

Warning signs on the horizon... WARNING Political: Democrats and Repubs point fingers over who's to blame about current and future economic problems. Ok, who forgot that 5 weeks of political indecision has had a big, bad toll on the economy? Also, another in a long series of funny dubya pictures. Check the large hands. How'd they get so big?
posted by evad (17 comments total)

Damn, what huge hands he has! LOL!
posted by FAB4GIRL at 9:35 PM on December 21, 2000

Who's afraid of a little indecision? Cripes, the economy has been waiting for an excuse at least since June. The election just gave it one. I've personally been expecting a recession in the next six months since, oh, 1997. That is, of course, a rolling six months.
posted by dhartung at 11:14 PM on December 21, 2000

Bush Sr was in office: the economy was ...sluggish. And I'm being kind.
Clinton was in office: it was the economy stupid. Things improved. A lot.
Bush Jr is now in office: economy is going to hell.

Just how much peanut butter must someone put on your bread before you notice it's there?
posted by ZachsMind at 12:22 AM on December 22, 2000

If old W keeps saying that he is worried about a recession that may or may not develop, we are going to have one on our hands. He has to lead that his comments carry a lot of weight now. If anyone else is looking for the bus to Canada for the next four years it leave January 21st.
posted by Bag Man at 1:01 AM on December 22, 2000

Zach, Bush Sr. did not cause the economic depression in 1989, and Clinton did not create the expansion. You can say that Clinton did not fuck it up, however...

And I'm not 100% about the 'expansion' anyway. Have we really gotten richer, or is it just the media? Sometimes it seems hard to tell. I know that people who trade in the stock market seem to have made some dough, but that doesn't really affect most of the people I know personally.

Anyway when Clinton said it was the economy, stupid, he didn't mean he was going to focus on the economy-- it meant he could score political points on Bush by making it the focus of the campaign. Which is exactly what is happening here, on both sides. How much peanut butter do you have to put on your bread until you realize it tastes a lot better with jelly?

posted by chaz at 1:04 AM on December 22, 2000

It seems to me that the whole tech sector started going to hell in April, long before the election.
posted by waxpancake at 1:54 AM on December 22, 2000

Ok, who forgot that 5 weeks of political indecision has had a big, bad toll on the economy?

I don't think it had one-tenth as much impact as the eight month free fall in the value of tech stocks. The NASDAQ average appears to have gone down more in the last week, since the election was decided, than it did in the preceding month.
posted by rcade at 5:41 AM on December 22, 2000

Dude, it's hard to blame the economy on George W. Bush when he hasn't even taken office yet. Doesn't happen for another month...
posted by dagnyscott at 6:52 AM on December 22, 2000

Heh, it's foreshadowing. :)
posted by sonofsamiam at 7:14 AM on December 22, 2000

it's hard to blame the economy on George W. Bush when he hasn't even taken office yet.

Except that a lot of economic decisions are made based on perception of what the future will be like. If people making economic decisions don't trust the new president to keep things going happily, they'll get out now rather than wait.

That said, the recent drops had more to do with the Federal Reserve deciding not to lower interest rates after it has been expected for weeks that they would, along with earnings warnings from lots of major companies and highly-watched tech stocks, from Microsoft to Lucent to Etoys. Those two factors would hit any market hard.

posted by daveadams at 8:08 AM on December 22, 2000

Remember, the current (or should I say past) boom in our economy has a lot to do with the final budget that George H. W. Bush proposed before leaving office.
posted by gyc at 8:15 AM on December 22, 2000

The only problem with "irrational exuberance", generally, is that society is only capable of sustaining such a collective hallucination for so long. Rationality, sanity, call it what you will, eventually breaks through like a psychopath with a chainsaw.
posted by holgate at 9:28 AM on December 22, 2000

That said, if W believes that he can get out of recession through consumer spending, on the back of an across the board tax cut, then he needs to be shot. As Bill Fleckenstein has pointed out on SiliconInvestor.com, the last six months have been a period of "stagflation": of rising wages and costs that aren't offset by productivity or economic growth. Economics 101 says that if you try to inject cash into the economy on the consumer side, you simply create the conditions for inflationary pressure and rising mortgage rates.

(In short, it's precisely the mess that the Tories faced after winning their poison chalice election in 1992. Expect pressure on the dollar pretty damn quickly.)
posted by holgate at 9:37 AM on December 22, 2000

Here are some Contrarian Economic thoughts:
If there is any lag time and/or ripple effect to Presidential tax policy's effects on the economy, then there is evidence that the best thing Bush the Elder did for the economy was to break his campagin promise and raise taxes.
Yes, Clinton was crassly politically unfair to attack Old George for it, especially since, by the same measure, the tax increases Bubba Bill signed before the Repubs took over Congress also contributed to the recent prosperity more than anything they've done since.
Of course, that assumes that the Federal Reserve, foreign trade, consumer confidence and industrial efficiency had little or nothing to do with it, but it is an effective point for making Supply Siders' heads explode.

Then again, if Greenspan is true to form, W.'s tax cut will look just inflationary enough to prompt the Fed to turn around and start raising interest rates again.
As a result, for a large portion of the population (persons with below Median incomes and above average indebtedness), some/most of the money they get back from the tax cut will go directly to the banks.
Nice trick.
posted by wendell at 10:27 AM on December 22, 2000

chaz, there IS a legitimate economic expansion. Stocks have risen, but so have other investments, and inflation has abated -- so the increase is real. Jobs have expanded to the highest level in a generation. There's no question we've had eight good years.

I love the way gyc credits Bush with Clinton's good times, but fails to credit the recession that occurred under Bush to either him OR Reagan. Whose fault was that -- Carter's?

The last thing you want to do in the face of a recession is reduce government spending. How stupid are these Republicans, anyway? Haven't they learned a thing?

But there isn't a recession yet. It's just that a 2% economy looks like a recession to people who are used to a 4% economy.
posted by dhartung at 11:17 AM on December 22, 2000

Except that a lot of economic decisions are made based on perception of what the future will be like. If people making economic decisions don't trust the new president to keep things going happily, they'll get out now rather than wait.

But people on Wall Street, particularly, like George W. Bush. They're money-grubbing Republicans, remember? :)
posted by dagnyscott at 5:53 PM on December 22, 2000

But people on Wall Street, particularly, like George W. Bush. They're money-grubbing Republicans, remember?

They KNOW Dubya's type. Who ever said Republicans like each other? I mean hell, Ebenezer Scrooge liked Jacob Marley, but didn't trust him any farther than he could throw the dead guy's coffin.

You can't kid a kidder or fool a fool. Looks to me like a lot of those money-grubbing Republicans are pulling out of the stock market or turning to more conservative methods because they know the odds are changing, cuz the deck is now stacked. Ever been to Las Vegas and you're doing pretty well and just when you hit a stride they change dealers on you? That's how the stock market's been feeling for the past few months.

I was gonna make yet another politically oriented MeFi post, but personally I'm sick of them. Rather than do that, I thought I'd just use this here reply in case someone hasn't seen this yet: Tom Tomorrow's Bizarro World take on the Florida Fiasco falls into my own personal pretty damn funny category.

All I know is my Daddy had a tough time of it through the 80s, and got laid off practically THE DAY Ronnie Reagan took office, and life pretty much sucked for 12 years. Bill Clinton went in there, and things started looking up for me financially speaking. Now Clinton's on his way out, and I'm beginning to notice the gravy train's startin' to run outta steam.

Remember that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when they're trapped with all those snakes and only a couple torches and some gasoline to fend them off and Karen Allen's staring helplessly at the torch screaming, "Indy! The light's going out!" That's the dotcom industry, folks. Right there in a nutshell. Who's side do you think Bush is on? Indy's or Beloch's? Hmmm?

Bush didn't have to do anything but show up. It's the fact that he's going in without a voter mandate. Maybe it'd be like this with Gore too, but the transition wouldn't have been as rocky, since Gore and Clinton do see eye to eye on at least a couple... well they agreed about the ashtrays in the White House at least. Bush going in there is like turning a garden hose on Zsa Zsa Gabor. The party won't be over, but she sure is gonna make a scene about it and it'll be bad!


posted by ZachsMind at 1:00 AM on December 24, 2000