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| quote: | Originally posted by The17sss
Note on the recession comment (don't kill the messenger... this is from today):
"The Bureau of Economic Analysis produced its second-quarter report, and it will surprise a few of the doom-and-gloom crowd. While certainly not spectacular, it shows that the economy continues to grow, improving on a weak first quarter to bounce up to 1.9% growth. The revised forecast for 2007’s final quarter reveals a retreat:"
"The BEA will issue its final look at Q2 at the end of August. They revised 2007Q4 downwards, showing it as the first quarter of negative GDP movement in at least four years. The GDP had previously been rated as a positive 0.6%, but now has been calculated at -0.2%. Overall GDP growth in 2007 went down a full point from 4.8% to 3.8%, still healthy but not as robust as earlier thought.
At the current rate, Q2 is the strongest quarter in the past three, showing growth despite a fuel-price crisis and a housing downturn. Thanks to a weak dollar, exports increased and the fall in imports accelerated over Q1. Housing continued to suffer but actually improved over Q1, and despite all of the talk of a recession in the air, consumer spending increased as well." Issuing hyperbolic, unrealistic statements about the American economy intends to panic Americans into bad policy. The economy does not need a lot of top-down management, and in fact a great deal of what ails us now originates in government meddling, such as with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and mandates on lending practices.
As for the other comment, it's been discussed on here before. It is a myth that only people making more than $250K will be subject to a tax break. If the capital gains tax doubles, over 100 million americans with stock and/or 401K's will be affected- where their taxes are deferred and they pay ordinary income taxes when they finally cash out. And if you think the spending under this administration was awful (which it was), Obama plans on spending $1 trillion over that... where's that going to come from, the top earning 1% of Americans? |
Do you really think the economy is doing well under the present circumstances? A GDP of .9% in Q1 of 2004 and an "advanced" estimate of 1.9% in Q2? A recession is no longer defined as negative GDP for two consecutive months but rather as a combination of GDP, unemployment, consumption, production, etc. This is all the more relevant because GDP does not take into account per capita increases. Furthermore, do you really think this all originates from Fannie and Freddie? Have you been following the write downs that have been plaguing us for the past year? That's just the subprime debt alone. There's a HUGE amount at risk in the prime and Alt-A market as well. This goes well beyond Fannie and Freddie. The Bush administration via Paulson, via the backing of congress, has been one of the most egregious advocates of the practice of privatizing profits while subsidizing the losses that I have ever seen.
Anyway I just saw my former boss mentioned in reuters hehe:
http://www.reuters.com/article/comp...G17231320080805 Andrukonis was a pretty smart and cool guy to work for ... Freddie ended up replacing him with a guy whose hiring practices ultimately led to something fairly close to a 50% attrition rate in my former risk management group.
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Retro ...
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