Are you under the impression that the recession started AFTER Bush took office? Turn off the media and look at the numbers, bumpkin. That was Slick Willy's recession.
Any thought at all that democrats are better than republicans is standing in a pile of waste......the two party paradigm is a con job! Global wealth entities use and abuse these little party pawns like rag dolls.......the two party system players no longer have ANY significant control over our country. That all disappeared many years ago when the citizens stopped getting involved DIRECTLY in their governments actions. If Reagan was still around, you could ask him about his wondrous meetings last minute at the RNC as Bush was CHOOSEN as his VP! Ask Clinton who suddenly started to fund massive TV ads during the democrat primaries that brought him to the lead OUT OF NO WHERE. The world is not as you are conned into seeing it.....the current two party system is a grand TV show for dumbed down viewers!
Greenspan fuelled the castles-in-the-sky super-sized consumption in the US. It was booming under Clinton. It fell apart with the aggressive Neocons meddling abroad and the world reacting to the interventions. The frenzied and fanatical Neocons acting on behalf of elitist old-money, polarized everyone and everything against them - making the world not partners - but the opposites in this polarization towards the US. Business and any relationship works by the principle of trust and integrity. The Neocons broke that. The world economy and populations reacted - that is the "5-year old toddler" version of history. The super-elitist Neocons broke what sortta was working well for the US, by aggressive greedy interventions.
Why the hell shouldn't Bush be blamed? If he didn't wage a useless war on Iraq, Americans wouldn't need to be sitting on top of the largest national debt in history and that would have helped us better cushion this current crisis. So fuck off, you RWN cuntheads!
I hate to (sort of) disagree with Pabst but bush and McCain have trouble staying on message and expressing themselves. I believe it is because they are a fairly low on the I.Q. scale. Contrary to the previous poster's comments about I.Q. I.Q. in a president could not be more important. Sure we estimate intelligence but somewhere in the 120-130 range we start thinking in systems and above that we start estimating how changes in variables may effect the whole. I.Q. is shitload more important than common sense when we start becoming more involved with complicated systems. The left and the P.C. folks for years have been trying to dumb down our thoughts and performances. You go to kids games now and they all get trophys and you hear stuff like "as long as they are having a good time". The result of allowing our society to listen to socialists speak is that the value of high I.Q. and success is denigrated. The result - a dope like McCain can sit on the same stage as romney and restate the same stupid point about being a war hero and a man who has done "service'. And a smart guy like Obama can get away with zero accomplishment and say hey was a community organizer for a party machine and feel entitled to the Presidency. Its about freaking time, we start understanding that things like, brains, success and accomplishment do matter. Even outside of sports. I suspect all you real traders are attracted to trading because in the long run it rewards those characteristics we respect. Trading is the exact opposite of the leftist p.c bullshit we hear from losers everyday.
Yes - the US situation is far worse. In the UK one minor building society/thrift (Northern Rock) went down and got nationalized, and one major bank was taken over by another bank in a market transaction. In the USA, 2 investment banks went bust, 1 got taken over in a firesale, and 2 converted to banks to save their asses. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored entities, went belly up and may need $1 trillion from the taxpayer. The country's biggest insurer AIG needed a government bailout. Dozens of mortgage lenders and financial companies have gone bust in the last year, along with numerous property developers. The US situation has been many, many times worse than the UK. In Germany, France and Japan, the other main economies in the G7, there has been no crisis at all. So we can rank the stupidity as: 1) Bush - far and away the worst 2) Blair/Brown - about half as stupid as Bush 3) Everyone else - not stupid at all, at least not for a politician.
Hehe, you want one? It's something we all "know". Systems science, logic and philosophy is different - people don't know shit in general...
Bingo! And that is why a guy like Ron Paul sounds like a superstar genius compared to the rest of the stooges. As controversial as Charles Murray's theories are - he fails when using Occam's razor and tries to predict, or rather influence by saying what we should do - get rid of welfare and social initiative; but he makes a valid point about the actual situation - describing the emerging system of intellectuals and their importance right now. This is exacerbated by the egalitarian nature of the Internet. Don't underestimate this. It is demolishing the old elitist economic and social control. News media, music industry - heck even porn production - is Jack, Joe and Jill now. And soon we will see emerging "merit based" systems - because going to an Ivy league institution will not matter so much in the future and with E-learning - you will have "computational trust" woven into interactions and social, business interactions on the Internet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_trust
I'm not a Bush fan, but at least get your facts straight. Dot.com bust happened under Clinton, which is a non issue anyway because it was a mega bubble waiting to happen. I hate when people blame Presidents for things totally out of their control. The meltdown isn't the fault of the President either. Its the fault of easy money creating a ridiculous bubble. That was the Fed's doing. They would have done it under any President because it worked for so long without inflation being a problem. The Prez does not tell the FED how to manage the economy. The FED is also non partisan. It was set up that way on purpose. Dot.com bust started March of 2000. Bush wasn't even sworn in until the following January.