Panderer in Chief

[Tree]

People assign charities this honor.  Here the charity is asking for the assignment.

In lieu of you receiving more flowers your survivors  don't need at your funeral.....

http://www.barackobama.com/obama-event-registry/

[ArtM72]

People assign charities this honor.  Here the charity is asking for the assignment.

In lieu of you receiving more flowers your survivors  don't need at your funeral.....

http://www.barackobama.com/obama-event-registry/

Tree - I greatly respect your posts, but nothing in that solicitation suggests bereavement gifts.  Far too often what I see from the political right is making things up because they can't present valid criticisms.  Yours is just one case in point.

Let me go out on a limb and guess you consider yourself a Republican or a conservative given the nature of your post.  Just how do you feel associating with the 30% of  Republicans who believe Obama is a Muslim?

  http://www.mediaite.com/online/new-poll-shows-conservative-republicans-increasingly-believe-obama-is-muslim/

Just how does it make you feel about associating your views with a party where over 50% of its members do not believe in evolution?

http://www.gallup.com/poll/27847/majority-republicans-doubt-theory-evolution.aspx

More important than how you feel, what do you think about those who share your political views?  Don't you ever wonder if you are running with the wrong crowd?  I strongly suspect you believe in geologic science and the age and origin of the reefs where IOC has found natural gas.  If not, you could not rationally make the investments you have in this company.

Just how do you resolve such conflicts between beliefs and the truth?

[admin]

Well, this forum certainly has come alive. I know passions run high but I hope it can stay civil and doesn't spoil relationships elsewhere on SHU..

[Tree]

People assign charities this honor.  Here the charity is asking for the assignment.

In lieu of you receiving more flowers your survivors  don't need at your funeral.....

http://www.barackobama.com/obama-event-registry/

Tree - I greatly respect your posts, but nothing in that solicitation suggests bereavement gifts.  Far too often what I see from the political right is making things up because they can't present valid criticisms.  Yours is just one case in point.

Let me go out on a limb and guess you consider yourself a Republican or a conservative given the nature of your post.  Just how do you feel associating with the 30% of  Republicans who believe Obama is a Muslim?

  http://www.mediaite.com/online/new-poll-shows-conservative-republicans-increasingly-believe-obama-is-muslim/

Just how does it make you feel about associating your views with a party where over 50% of its members do not believe in evolution?

http://www.gallup.com/poll/27847/majority-republicans-doubt-theory-evolution.aspx

More important than how you feel, what do you think about those who share your political views?  Don't you ever wonder if you are running with the wrong crowd?  I strongly suspect you believe in geologic science and the age and origin of the reefs where IOC has found natural gas.  If not, you could not rationally make the investments you have in this company.

Just how do you resolve such conflicts between beliefs and the truth?

Art, sorry you miss the point  and consequently avoid the point.  I was being absurd to point out Obama's pandering for gifts that rightfully belong to others.  Here are a couple of ideas:

1) You could always register with the Obama Registry and donate your upcoming IOC profits from the NEC approval and then again upon SD announcement.

2) Since you bring up who is aligning with Romney to discredit me, then you must take great comfort in aligning yourself with those that support Obama.

Domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and his terrorist wife Bernadette

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers,

The Black Liberation Theologist Rev. Wright, Tony Rezco, George Soros, Michael Moore.  Not all are fans of Obama's fans.

3) Have you ever researched how well Obama 'Cares' for his own half brother George Obama?  If Obama was sincere about improving your life he would share a few bucks with his own brother.  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2186782/Obamas-slumdog-brother-Meet-hopeless-drunk-Nairobi-shanty-town-U-S-Presidents-BROTHER.html

Problem in 2008 was that Obama was not vetted and his problem in 2012 is he now finally is.  The left has been making excuses for Obama since the 1st debate and cannot understand what was wrong with him.  What was wrong was facts and an opponent not letting him lie and that was obvious to 70% of the folks that watched.  Romney exposed a teleprompterless Obama to be the poser he is in their first debate.  Ryan will expose Biden in the same manner and Romney will do it again in the next debate.

Anyways, we will agree to disagree on Obama, but ask yourself "If Bush was President would you be turning a blind eye to the ME mess and lack of leadership, the additional 6$ trillion in debt, nationalizing health care that most Americans do not want, governing through executive order, blaming his lack of performance on his predecessor" and on and on I could go.

Good luck Art and I really hope you send your IOC profits to Obama, he will need them at least as much as you do!!

This is more fun than IOC forum!!

[ArtM72]

People assign charities this honor.  Here the charity is asking for the assignment.

In lieu of you receiving more flowers your survivors  don't need at your funeral.....

http://www.barackobama.com/obama-event-registry/

Tree - I greatly respect your posts, but nothing in that solicitation suggests bereavement gifts.  Far too often what I see from the political right is making things up because they can't present valid criticisms.  Yours is just one case in point.

Let me go out on a limb and guess you consider yourself a Republican or a conservative given the nature of your post.  Just how do you feel associating with the 30% of  Republicans who believe Obama is a Muslim?

  http://www.mediaite.com/online/new-poll-shows-conservative-republicans-increasingly-believe-obama-is-muslim/

Just how does it make you feel about associating your views with a party where over 50% of its members do not believe in evolution?

http://www.gallup.com/poll/27847/majority-republicans-doubt-theory-evolution.aspx

More important than how you feel, what do you think about those who share your political views?  Don't you ever wonder if you are running with the wrong crowd?  I strongly suspect you believe in geologic science and the age and origin of the reefs where IOC has found natural gas.  If not, you could not rationally make the investments you have in this company.

Just how do you resolve such conflicts between beliefs and the truth?

Art, sorry you miss the point  and consequently avoid the point.  I was being absurd to point out Obama's pandering for gifts that rightfully belong to others.  Here are a couple of ideas:

1) You could always register with the Obama Registry and donate your upcoming IOC profits from the NEC approval and then again upon SD announcement.

2) Since you bring up who is aligning with Romney to discredit me, then you must take great comfort in aligning yourself with those that support Obama.

Domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and his terrorist wife Bernadette

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers,

The Black Liberation Theologist Rev. Wright, Tony Rezco, George Soros, Michael Moore.  Not all are fans of Obama's fans.

3) Have you ever researched how well Obama 'Cares' for his own half brother George Obama?  If Obama was sincere about improving your life he would share a few bucks with his own brother.  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2186782/Obamas-slumdog-brother-Meet-hopeless-drunk-Nairobi-shanty-town-U-S-Presidents-BROTHER.html

Problem in 2008 was that Obama was not vetted and his problem in 2012 is he now finally is.  The left has been making excuses for Obama since the 1st debate and cannot understand what was wrong with him.  What was wrong was facts and an opponent not letting him lie and that was obvious to 70% of the folks that watched.  Romney exposed a teleprompterless Obama to be the poser he is in their first debate.  Ryan will expose Biden in the same manner and Romney will do it again in the next debate.

Anyways, we will agree to disagree on Obama, but ask yourself "If Bush was President would you be turning a blind eye to the ME mess and lack of leadership, the additional 6$ trillion in debt, nationalizing health care that most Americans do not want, governing through executive order, blaming his lack of performance on his predecessor" and on and on I could go.

Good luck Art and I really hope you send your IOC profits to Obama, he will need them at least as much as you do!!

This is more fun than IOC forum!!

We'll agree to disagree.  However, if you would like me to refute any of the points you made above, just let me know.

Art

[admin]

I'll have a go at a few of the points being made:

1) Blaming the mess on predecessor

Well, you have to realize what happened in 2008 was really quite something else and produced a type of recession that is different from your garden variety business cycle, like the early 1980s, for instance.

It was caused by overleveraging, by households and banks, on the back of rising house prices. When the latter started to fall it destroyed household and bank balance sheets to such an extent that the bans had to be bailed out and households lost a whopping $9 trillion in wealth due to the 40% drop in house values.

The resulting deleveraging process means households borrowing and spending less, and saving more, paying off debt. This is indeed what happened.

Now, such a balance sheet recession is very different from the recession in the early 1980s:

• Reinhart and Rogoff have argued in a famous book based on historical data that these recessions take much more time to heal (and indeed, Japan spend a couple of decades deleveraging)
• Monetary policy is quite powerless as even at zero interest rates people prefer to pay off debt, rather than take on new loans
• There is a distinct danger of a Fisherian debt-deflationary spiral downwards without any policy intervention
• Fiscal policy becomes extra powerful because of the increase in savings produce low interest rates and there is plenty of spare capacity to avoid crowding out of the private sector.

The curious thing is, we know that monetary policy has been mostly exhausted and isn't very effective under such conditions, but fiscal policy is. Contrary to popular myth, the stimuls bill has been effective, just as austerity invariably produced bad results under these conditions, compare how the US fared with the US in 1937, or Japan in 1997, or Spain in the last two years. All cases are the aftermath of credit infused bubbles having imploded (that is, producing balance sheet recessions where the private sector pays off debt no matter how low interest rates go), but the latter three cases are where austerity was prematurely embarked upon, producing pretty disasterous results in the process.

Just this week, even the IMF has acknowledged this, arguing that fiscal multipliers are probably much larger than previously thought under these conditions (see post under Economy in this forum).

So what I take away from this is:

1. Deleveraging is a lenghty process
2. Fiscal policy is effectively the only tool when the private sector cuts borrowing and spending in order to repair balance sheets.

Where I respectfully disagree with conservatives is in their ridicule of the stimulus bill. Apart from being one of the largest tax cuts in US history(!), it has been rather effective to stem the verignious decline in 2008-9. This is what theory would predict under these circumstances, but also what happened on the ground. Economic growth, employment, world trade, world stockmarkets, they all fell with the same speed or even faster than in the early 1930s, until something arrested that decline..

Here are Eichengreen and O'Rourke:

To sum up, globally we are tracking or doing even worse than the Great Depression, whether the metric is industrial production, exports or equity valuations. Focusing on the US causes one to minimise this alarming fact. The “Great Recession” label may turn out to be too optimistic. This is a depression-sized event.

A depression size event that didn't turn out to be a depression, let's keep that in mind..

[Petrovale]

STP, the U.S. government has fiscalized just about everything, from A to Z. So, they can count just about everything from A to Z. Therefore, Washington D.C. is a great place to do economic research, and there are many politicians & prostitutes willing to manipulate so-called facts. In my opinion, there are two reasons to be suspicious of these so-called facts:

1) opportunities for drill down are extremely limited, whether it concerns GDP by component or international trade by various customs codes;
2) everything is denominated in dollars, be they constant dollars, while real quantities are conveniently forgotten.

So, basically, no one knows what goes around the real US economy, yet everyone has a mouth full about various policy prescriptions.

Will the real entrepreneurs please stand up, and tell us what is their reasonable strategy to rebuild confidence and the economy, not just nationally but - ideally - also internationally. After all, the statistics factory at the EU has been proven to be of an even more deplorable and despicable quality and EU politicians are probably even more apathetic and lethargic than those in the Obama administration.

Best,
Petro

[ArtM72]

Petro - Isn't that what Jack Welch said the other day? 'I don't like the numbers so I won't believe them'?

The ice hasn't been melting in the ArcticOcean or Glacier National or anywhere else. We all know liberal scientists are cooking the books. Just another example, right?

If you don't agree with the data just deny it exists. Makes me a little uncomfortable with IOC for the first time. I hope their geologists aren't cooking the books, but I've learned to I expect more from Canadians than Americans. For some reason Canadians seem to try much harder to hold close to the truth.

I'm going to leave these political threads on SHU very soon if not immediately. I've learned they simply go nowhere while consuming a great deal of time.

[admin]

Well, I largely disagree with that, I have to say. I'm not sure it's helpful do cast doubt on figures unless one has concrete grounds for doing so about a concrete datapoint.

Secondly, I'm not convinced entrepreneurs make better macro-economists, but you would expect me to say that, wouldn't you (I am a macro-economist, after all)

Third, there is important corroborating evidence for what I wrote above. The underlying model is basically able to explain a whole complex of data (for instance, the absence of hyperinflation in the face of massive "money printing" or the absence of escalating bond yields in the face of terrible public deficits and debts).

[Petrovale]

STP, thanks for your insights. I just meant to say that it's too easy to copy and paste a simple chart, and present it as a factual truth. When one takes a deeper look at the composition of the statistics, many questions arise. This problem grows even more serious when comparing US statistics with European or Japanese numbers, on both national and company levels. Modeling with this information can be useful, but the results are, in my experience, indicative at best.

Surely, many micro economies make up the macro economy, and - as a small entrepreneur working with various sizes of capital - I know that those driving those important microcosms often have no political audience. Hence, I repeat my point that we have too many technocrats, often economists and lawyers, in between. I would like to see those with skin in the game stand up and speak their mind. And, if they don't, I'm afraid they have already given up.