He's probably planning 5 golf outings, 2 vacations and 3 more hip-hop bashes at the House to de-stress from all this.
And what kind of shape did Carter leave the country in? Terrible. He certainly had a hand in current ills as well. I don't condone the spending or wars of the Republicans. But if you want to point fingers, you also have to go back to the Democrat acronym presidents (FDR and LBJ) for starting the ever-growing entitlement mess and welfare state.
Is a downgrade really that big of a deal? I know it will probably hurt the stock market short term, but for right now, bond traders are not that horrified of US debt at this point. Long bonds are priced in the $130's.
I wonder how much of this was priced in this week, though? I mean we were supposed to mega-rally after Bin Laden's death and after raising the debt ceiling (whether it was a good long-term idea or not). It's possible the markets will whipsaw everyone in a frenzy and end in a gain after this. It usually does whatever it can to fool the most people.
Well, now we know what the last two weeks was about. At this point, everybody is going to be expecting a blood bath on Monday. I dunno, I'd be inclined to lay a bet the other way. But only in a way that had strictly limited downside (and I don't mean stops) - because it truly be carnage.
Yes, the country was in a slight recession with a downturn in the business cycle when Carter left office. However, reessions and downturns always happen, and, obviously, still happen to this very day. The key is to ride them out and not damage this country's long term future by running up debt to solve a problem that will solve itself over time. It's clear that 30+ years (after Carter left office) of using debt in the form of tax cuts and spending to "stimulate" the economy out of recessions has failed the long term test. It will probably be looked back on as a noble experiment, but one that was fundamentally doomed from the start. Jimmy Carter made the right decision to try to ride out the cyclical nature of the recession and not mortgage this country's future by stimulus, even if it cost him the election.