Who's Watching The Economy?

villabolo

Everyone is watching the economy only problem is that they are all nearsighted.

slimboyfat

No mention for the guys who got the US in this mess in the first place.

You think left-wing ideologues could wait a decent few months at least before they start pretending this is all Obama's fault.

Elsewhere

I have resigned myself to the fact that I have no effect on the economy as a whole.

I'm just running along in my little hamster wheel.

shamus100

U.S. political threads are just like watching Jerry Springer. Only Jerry Springer has much more class.

jaguarbass

It took Bushy Boy 8 years to destroy the economy.

It may not be fixable and if it is its going to take more than 3 months.

Bushy boy let all the jobs leave the country.

No jobs = no economy = third world country=

concentration camps to gas the excess people.

The people/ Gods who pull the puppets strings want to reduce

the worlds population to 500 million.

Its obvious that they are bankrupting the US economy starting with Bush his stupid war and all his give

aways tax refunds to stimulate an economy that has no jobs and doesnt produce

anything except beer, prostitutes and inusrance salesmen.

Obamas just continuing the mission.

When they bankrupt the economy they will step in with Marshall law and 1 world government,

And a lot of bible prophecies will be fulfilled.

I'm not a big fan of the bible, and I hope it doesnt happen.

But that's where it looks like its heading to me.

At least Obama can lie in complete sentences.

Bush was a post turtle.

What's a post turtle?

When you drive down the road and you see a turtle on a post,

You know he doesnt belong there.

And you know he didnt get there on his own.

They are doing a phenomenal job. If you divide how much they've spent by how long Obama has been in office, it works out to 1 Billion dollars an hour. That's how you fix problems too much money created, you throw more money at it!

BTS

sammielee24

LOL..we all are - I think Bush had a crusade to see how far down he could take his country - call it a personal goal. Now the Dems have to fix it...so we're keeping an eye on how the renovations are going and unfortunately it's kind of like filling a pot when your tap only drips water...it might take a little longer but it will get there! sammieswife.

And while a lot of (small) bad loans were made to poor people by the subprime-lending industry, a bunch of (really big) bad loans were made by wealthy institutions—Wall Street investment banks, opportunity funds, hedge funds—to other really rich people. Broadway Partners, a high-flying real estate investor, recently defaulted on a loan it took from other high-flying financial institutions, which it used to buy the John Hancock tower in Boston for $1.3 billion in December 2006. (The Boston Globe estimated the building is now worth between $700 million and $900 million.) And the most toxic of the toxic assets—collateralized debt obligations, commercial mortgage-backed securities, credit-default swaps—were explicitly off-limits to middle-class investors. They were manufactured by rich investment bankers and sold to hedge funds and proprietary trading desks.

Finally, let's not forget the scams. Plenty of poor and working-class people got fleeced in housing-related scams. But you could add them all up, and they'd still be dwarfed by the biggest one of them all, Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme, which disproportionately targeted the already wealthy.

The Dumb Money debacle required the active work (or passive nonwork) of hordes of really well-compensated professionals: executives at financial-services companies, hedge-fund managers, corporate board members, credit ratings agency officials, private-equity investors, CEOs. These were people who had every incentive to preserve the system and the wealth it had produced for them, their friends, and their neighbors. So if you want to find the real culprits in the war on wealth, don't look to Washington. Walk down Fifth Avenue, get on a chairlift at Aspen, turn on CNBC, or charter a jet to St. Bart's.

Daniel Gross is the Moneybox columnist for Slate and the business columnist for Newsweek. You can e-mail him at [email protected]. His latest book, "Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation," has just been published as an e-book.

Who's Watching The Economy?

Nathan Natas