dem or repub president better for economy

I did a variation on Jeremy Siegel's analysis on which presidents were best for the US economy. I often hear from people that this type of analysis is flawed because it takes some time for a president's policies to take effect and be felt by the economy. So I built in some delays in the analysis to account for this. It turns out that even with a 2 year delay in measuring the Dow, the dems still win. Take a look! http://www.myquant.net/trivia.html

 

Interesting -- here's a debt graph by president as well:

http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

 

Not sure why more people aren't commenting on this.

 

I guess the debt story with the recent republicans has been well known but it is quite striking to see again just how much debt Reagan and the two Bushes racked up. I would also venture to guess that this debt graph may not include the billions and billions of "emergency" off-budget funding for Iraq which dwarfs every other historical calculation of the budget deficit ever reported on. This makes Clinton's legacy even greater since he managed to get the economy to grow while reducing debt.

 

Hmmm...

Growth policies vs. wealth-transfer policies?

 

Debt is definitely a wealth transfer to your kids (so is lowering taxes on the rich and increasing state tax burdens on the middle class)

 

What were Treasury yields on long dated securities under Clinton compared to Bush?

 

LOL. You could work in Italy with all your cherry picking.

"Look, five year convertible bonds with serial numbers starting with "E" did .2 of a percent better under Bush!"

 

Thirty year Treasuries-the issue with the most sensitivity to fiscal concerns-are over 100 basis points lower in yield than in Jan/01. T-Bond yields are 200 basis points lower than their peak in 1999.

I know you made this point on another recent thread that the Bush deficits have led to a lower dollar-not at all true. There's other reasons for dollar losses. U.S. debt as a measure of GDP AND on a per capita basis is MUCH lower than several other G8 nations. Japan for example has 2.7x the amount of per capita government held debt as the U.S. Further Japan's debt is over twice their % of GDP as America's. I'm not arguing against rightful concerns over deficit spending but there's a hysteria level of 0.0 in financial markets over these deficits.

 

"The 30-year Treasury used to be the bellwether U.S. bond but now most consider the 10-year Treasury to be the benchmark."

Very well then. Why is the house on fire?

Here's one theory:

"A year after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed the old regulations, Swiss Bank UBS gobbled up brokerage house Paine Weber. Two years later, Gramm settled in as a vice chairman of UBS’s new investment banking arm.

"According to federal lobbying disclosure records, Gramm lobbied Congress, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department about banking and mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006.

"During those years, the mortgage industry pressed Congress to roll back strong state rules that sought to stem the rise of predatory tactics used by lenders and brokers to place homeowners in high-cost mortgages.

"For his work, Gramm and two other lobbyists collected $750,000 in fees from UBS’s American subsidiary. In the past year, UBS has written down more than $18 billion in exposure to subprime loans and other risky securities and is considering cutting as many as 8,000 jobs."