Posted by: laceyunderalls at September 02, 2010 11:35 AM (pLTLS)"

You know when you have something on your resume that you wish you'd never done....and you try very hard to figure out how to avoid putting the item down but then can't figure out how to explain away those months or years.....christina has that problem

Real key is that they measure success by just looking at the GDP... while the GDP just measures the movment of money, not whether or not that money is being put to good use.

So the GDP is being suplemented by Government Deficit Spending... but that money is doing nothing productive...

Its like the Obama Tax credit in the "stimulus"... made the GDP look better, but didn't produce many jobs because it was targeted at consumers, not business's... and so a LOT of that money was spent on products which are produced overseas.

Well, I wouldn't give any respect to her if she's my lecturer.

/I'll still lie to get my grades, but absolute no respect

Oh, you mean all that made up acedemic shit they were spewing for decades doesn't work in the real world?  Whodda thunk it?

A quick scan-through of her wiki doesn't indicate that, although it's very obvious she has no private sector experience.

Your point?

I wonder if Karl Denninger will have anything to say on this later on today--he's been harping off and on for a while that the reason the administration completely futzed up this "recovery" is because, deliberately or not, they analyzed the problem as a liquidity issue, rather than a debt issue.

In other words, they and the jokers at the Fed thought they could pump a bunch of bonded funny money into the system, and that would result in a recovery and get people to spend more money.  Denninger's position has been that the real problem is everyone and everything is so over-leveraged, that things won't start to improve until that debt gets ramped back significantly.  Obama's spend-a-thon, in other words, was the exact opposite of what needed to be done.

Personally, I'm starting to think that the execution of this stimulus was nothing more than a hedge bet on the economy.  Obama thought that this depression was an ordinary run-of-the-mill recession like we had in 1990 and 2001, and as long as he was shown to be "doing something," he could take credit for what was a natural economic cycle.  However, all it did was temporarily paper over various state budget deficits--which are now becoming an issue because they never really went away--and their hedge bet has been shown to be disastrously wrong.

The result has been the implementation of structural deficits of around $1.5 trillion.  Quite honestly, if Obama really did want to take down the United States, I couldn't think of any other tactic that could be more effective. 

Posted by: Kratos (Ghost of Sparta) at September 02, 2010 11:44 AM (9hSKh)

OK, I was confusing her with some other fugly scrunt.

Posted by: laceyunderalls at September 02, 2010 11:41 AM (pLTLS)"

(puts hand over ears "I can't hear you" lalallallalalallala) (curious acting like a lib/dem)

Posted by: geoff at September 02, 2010 11:51 AM (clc+K)"

When timmaaaay said that one of my friends said "oh crap does this mean we're going to see 11% or higher, I think so"....

they haven't leaked tomorrow's numbers doesn't that mean the numbers should be decent?

Posted by: Romer's ass at September 02, 2010 11:56 AM (RykTt)

Let me guess, it's "get your fugly self out of Dodge before TSHTF and hide out in academia on the other edge of the continent."

Posted by: Red Rocks Rockin' at September 02, 2010 11:49 AM (lfyq/)

So if I am reading this right, this administration thought that really by doing nothing that the economy would recover naturally.  To not let the 'crisis' go to waste (SWIDT), they tossed billions dollars of payments towards their various friends and supporters as a payoff disguised as a stimulus that was never really intended to stimulate anything but future support for votes.

Is that about right?

When timmaaaay said that one of my friends said "oh crap does this mean we're going to see 11% or higher, I think so"....

they haven't leaked tomorrow's numbers doesn't that mean the numbers should be decent?

Posted by: curious at September 02, 2010 11:56 AM (p302b)

Or the numbers really suck.  Your kid is going to wait until the last possible moment to tell you that he just totaled the car.

Posted by: Circa (Insert Year Here) at September 02, 2010 11:56 AM (NvFZs)

Didn't you do the assigned reading?  It means, "Bush's fault!"

So if I am reading this right, this administration thought that really by doing nothing that the economy would recover naturally.  To not let the 'crisis' go to waste (SWIDT), they tossed billions dollars of payments towards their various friends and supporters as a payoff disguised as a stimulus that was never really intended to stimulate anything but future support for votes.

Yeah, that would be my take on it.  Like I said, I'm not really sure if they did this consciously or not, but it would certainly reflect the "weighted scale" methodology that Obama's relied on to get by his whole life.

The most amazing thing is that Geithner basically told everybody that unemployment was going to be in the 9-10% range for the forseeable future, and didn't propose to do anything about it. And the press didn't skewer him for it!

Probably because after completely boning their guess on the U-3 drop, they had to lower expectations so that anything remotely positive could be trumpted by President Pretty, Pretty Princess as a sign that "things are improving."  The press has already adopted this tactic--see yesterday's reports on the ISM, and today's reports on housing and jobless data, which really weren't all that great--so I expect the administration to really start pumping normally bad news as "signs of improvement."

It's a liquidity crisis as well as a debt issue.

Not really, because the argument that it's a liquidity issue--which is what the administration based its push for the stimulus on--is founded on the presumption that Americans need to be constantly spending money in order to keep the economy going.  While on a fundamental level that's true, what we've seen the last 35 years has been an exponential growth in credit creation (making up dollars out of thin air) in the finance and housing industry, and encouraging Americans to take advantage of it by spending themselves further and further into debt.  The government adopted the same strategy during this time period by spending money beyond its means regardless of the state of the economy. 

We've essentially papered over our financial shortfalls ever since the Nixon era, when the oil crisis kicked off a massive ramp-up in inflation, and all this extending and pretending is coming back to bite us in the ass.  Until the debt is cleared from the system, there won't be a recovery built on anything sustainable.

I'm so sick of hearing how super smart the Obama team is. 

we, like virtually every other forecaster, failed to anticipate how violent the recession would be in the absence of policy, and the degree to which the usual relationship between GDP and unemployment would break down

No, you fat twit, not everyone was surprised at how bad this was going to be nor we surprised that your policies were going to make it worse. 

How about next time we get some people who work in the real world to do policy instead of another clueless school teacher who lives in the world of theory.

Well, no wonder we're in trouble.

Chris Farley is running our economy.

I predicted in Nov '08 that Teh Won and his merry band of statists were going to precipitate an economic depression.  It gets me no satisfaction to be proved correct.

Those dipshits assumed that the economy would bounce back "because it always did before" and be able to get credit by the mid-term election cycle. What they forgot was that they were pouring sugar in the fuel tank of the economic engine.

@62

Oops, fat finger error: 

gets = gives

Quien es mas macho:  Sonya Sotomayor, Janet Napolitano, Elena Kagan, e Christina Romer?

Pittsburgh Steelers:  

"Sonya Sotomayor, Janet Napolitano, Elena Kagan, and Christina Romer, will be the new "Steel Curtain" defense."

Posted by: ya2daup at September 02, 2010 01:25 PM (HmCnI)

Proof that it is a teabagger recession.

TARP - 24 months later.......

The banking crisis of 2008 which precipitated TARP was indeed a liquidity problem, but the underlying cause for the liquidity problem was.......BAD DEBT.

The banks knew it, which is why they invented those mortgage backed securities, to create an income stream from....BAD DEBT.

So in 2005 or 2006 when Real estate evaluations started to tip over, anyone who knew anything (not me, that's for sure), should have been running for the exits.

Indeed, the bad debt accumulated over the last 10 years at least (and there is probably a lot more out there), is the dead weight that will keep the economy from floating to the top again. Obama and Romer have wasted several trillion (trillion!) dollars in a counter productive way. The Chinese and others have a lot of our paper (T-Bills) that might be...worth less than their face value (scary, ain't it?), so you think they might get....mad?

I have to ask: was their reasoning that for each dollar of GDP we should have X number of jobs so all the government has to do is spend Y number of dollars to get additional jobs?

Because if that was their reasoning, they are stupid idiots.