President Obama Explains What The "Fiction-Peddling" BLS Got Wrong – Live Feed
By Tyler Durden
Grab your popcorn. Having proclaimed his greatest achievement during his presidency as “saving the world from another Great Depression,” we wonder what President Obama will have to say today when he discusses the economy. Following the decline in corporate profits, a manufacturing sector in recession, an auto industry which is shuttering production, minimum wage state job losses rising, and an equity market that is unable to make new highs, what cynical, skeptical, “fiction-peddlers” will he blame today's dismal jobs data on?
President Barack Obama on Friday will deliver a statement “on the economy and new steps to strengthen financial transparency and combat money laundering, corruption, and tax evasion,” the White House said.
President Obama is due to speak on the economy at 1205ET…
Alternate Live Feed…
How long before Janet gets another visit from the smoke-and-mirrors-er-in-chief?
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While we are at it, we wonder if Obama will explain why Donald Trump's support is soaring if everything is so awesome…
President Obama’s remarkable interview last week with the New York Times ‘s Andrew Ross Sorkin shows why historians are likely to assign Mr. Obama a share of responsibility for the rise of Donald Trump.
To be sure, the president was dealt a tough hand in 2009, and he played it brilliantly at first. His much-criticized Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, did what was necessary to pull the U.S. financial system back from the brink. Under intense pressure, the president’s team crafted a package of steps that saved the American automobile industry. The Obama administration’s stimulus package, despite its defects, helped slow a steep economic decline, which at its worst was destroying 800,000 jobs monthly.
Mr. Obama has every right to claim credit for preventing a second Great Depression that would have taken down the entire global economy.
This was a great first act. Unfortunately, there was no Act 2 and, as Mr. Sorkin reports, Mr. Obama knows it. The president laments, for example, “our failure in 2012, 2013, 2014, to initiate a massive infrastructure project” means that “there were folks who we could have helped and put back to work and entire communities that could have prospered that ended up taking a lot longer to recovery.”
The only problem with the president’s lament is its chronology. The failure occurred much earlier, in 2009 and 2010, when Mr. Obama still enjoyed the support of a Democratic-led Congress he needed to move boldly. Despite campaigning for a national infrastructure bank in 2008, he didn’t insist on including it in the 2009 stimulus bill. He didn’t even publicly raise the matter until September 2010, when the midterm election was looming and the chance of enacting new legislation was effectively nil.
This was part of a broader strategic decision to move from his initial focus on averting economic disaster to other concerns—notably, the Affordable Care Act and carbon cap-and-trade legislation. Whatever balance of benefits and opportunity costs the focus on health care may have entailed, the months the House spent in 2009 on an environmental bill …read more
Source: President Obama Explains What The "Fiction-Peddling" BLS Got Wrong – Live Feed
