By every measure things are a lot worse in the US than they were 8 years ago when this administration took power.
The Dow finished lower on September 29 than it was on January 19, 2001. The NASDAQ was at 2770.38 back then, compared with 1983.73 on Monday. The dollar used to trade at 1.068 against the Euro compared with .695
Some things have gone up
- the Consumer Price Index (175 vs 219 today)
- unemployment (4.2% vs 6.1%)
“It’s a striking phenomenon,” said Robert Shapiro, former undersecretary of commerce. “The reckless negligence and mismanagement of the country’s financial markets by the White House, the Treasury and the Fed over the last several years has now produced a crisis that has wiped out all of the increase in the market value of America’s companies from five years of record corporate profits, strong productivity gains, and reasonable growth. Bush has now run the table on presidential failure.”
We have to ask - can McCain/Palin and Republicans like Darrell Issa change course to follow more sensible policies and avert a disaster of their own making?
From the New York Times regarding the bailout:
Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican, said he was “resolute” in his opposition to the measure because it would betray party principles and amount to “a coffin on top of Ronald Reagan’s coffin.”
Once again Issa’s ideology gets in the way of doing what’s right for the folks on Main Street. Please send us your comments.
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:25 am
I understand and agree with your statement of the problem… We should all agree that failure to regulate, elimination of market rules and bias toward the capital markets has created this crisis …we need to get out of where we’re at as our retirement savings are being destroyed at this point.