Barack Obama’s disastrous first 1,000 days

Originally Posted by Bluesguy View Post
Obama was a full voting member of the Democrat controlled congress two year before he took office. Give me a list of the legislation he entered in order to shore up and prevent the mess he ultimately has put us in.

A FULL VOTING MEMBER, with the same capability to introduce legislation and even more so as it became more and more apparent he would be their next nominee for President.

Let's see that damage Bush and the Republican congress was 52 months of full employment, record revenues, three years of deficit reduction handing the Democrat Congress a $161 billion declining deficit. Then Obama and the Dems took over.

And more myths, it was purely Democrat housing policies and their refusal to deal with it and then their doing exactly the wrong things during a recession.

We see where it has gotten us, they own this economy and will pay for it.

 

Mr. FRANK. Well, let me ask a question. Does any accuracy threaten the safety and soundness? That is what bothers me. There is a quality and a quantity issue here.
There are inaccuracies that can be disturbing, and if they led to inappropriate compensation, I would be very unhappy. But the notion that any inaccuracy implicates safety and soundness, I think, based on what you have said here, where you cannot even conclude—you have said you cannot even quantify any potential amount of loss. To throw ''safety and soundness'' around in that thing I think really is, for a regulator, irresponsible.
Mr. FALCON. Well, I think internal controls are a very serious safety and soundness concern. A breakdown or a lack of internal controls——
Mr. FRANK. Do you think the safety and soundness is at risk right now?
Chairman BAKER. Mr. Crowley, that will have to be your last question. If you can wrap up.
Mr. FRANK. He accepts that.
Mr. CROWLEY. That was my first question, as a matter of fact.
Mr. FRANK. Yes, I mean, you have just told Mr. Crowley it didn't implicate safety and soundness. Does it, your report, what you have reported?
Mr. FALCON. No, I think our report absolutely does implicate safety and soundness.
Mr. FRANK. Is the safety and soundness at risk now?
Mr. FALCON. Are they at risk of becoming insolvent right now? No. We have an agreement with the board in place that will address these problems, provide an adequate capital cushion. We think we——
Mr. FRANK. That is the answer. The rest is just rhetoric.

 

I think you're living in a fantasy world as to what it was like when Bush left office.

Here's a reminder.


January 2009

Job loss: Worst in 34 years
Employers slashed 598,000 more jobs in January [2009] as unemployment rate climbed to 7.6%.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Employers slashed another 598,000 jobs off of U.S. payrolls in January, taking the unemployment rate up to 7.6%, according to the latest government reading on the nation's battered labor market.

The latest job loss is the worst since December 1974, and brings job losses to 1.8 million in just the last three months, or half of the 3.6 million jobs that have been lost since the beginning of 2008.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/06/news/economy/jobs_january/index.htm

Market players were also disappointed by reports that U.S. home prices fell 8.7% year-over-year in November, U.S. housing starts fell 15.5% in December, and weekly initial jobless claims rose 62,000 to 589,000.
http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/jan2009/pi20090122_192905.htm

On Wednesday, the 30-stock Dow Jones industrial average finished with a loss of 248.42 points, or 2.94%, to 8,200.

http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/jan2009/pi20090114_103250.htm

598,000 Jobs Shed In Brutal January
Unemployment Hits 7.6% as Downturn Picks Up Steam

The need for progress on those fronts seemed more important than ever yesterday, as the Labor Department announced that conditions worsened more than expected last month. The nation's employers shed 598,000 jobs, the most since 1974, driving the unemployment rate to 7.6 percent from 7.2 percent. If the jobless rate keeps rising at the pace it has for the past two months, it will hit double digits in summer and reach its highest rate since the Great Depression by the fall.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/06/AR2009020601156.html

GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT: FOURTH QUARTER 2008 (PRELIMINARY)
Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- decreased at an annual rate of 6.2 [later revised to 7.0] percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, (that is, from the third quarter to the fourth quarter), according to preliminary estimates released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/2009/pdf/gdp408p.pdf[/QUOTE]

Continued Unemployment Claims at Record High
In the week ending Jan. 24, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 588,000, an increase of 3,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 585,000.

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/01/continued-unemployment-claims-at-record.html[/quote]

Are we better off now than then? Hell yes.

 

Continued Unemployment Claims at Record High
In the week ending Jan. 24, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 588,000, an increase of 3,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 585,000.

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/01/continued-unemployment-claims-at-record.html[/quote]

Are we better off now than then? Hell yes.[/QUOTE]


**********************************
Face it ... all you lefties have are a pack of lies and spin generating
web sites designed to debunk things that aren't even factual in nature
but mere bias.
The American people no longer buy yer drool { Talking pt. Spin}
Obama is a con artist.No one forced him to make all those highfalutin
pledges and promises about creating jobs and unemployment not
going over 8%.Yes,Obama can manage somehow to have the CBO
say stuff and predict and give the OK for things that are based in lies
and Democrat derived skewed numbers.
The bottom line can't be Spun.
The dollar was Strong under Bush compared to Obama and Today.
Unemployment was Non-existent under Bush as opposed to today.
Inflation was not even an issue when Bush was President unlike Today.
Bush raised record Revenues while instituting Tax cuts and lowering
the Capital Gains rate { helping Investors }.
Under this President Capitalism is now a dirty word.The hallmark of what
once seperated this Country and made us a Superpower.
Under Obama the Marxist we'll be no different than France before long.
I'm just wondering when this Administration will see fit to have their
annual book burnings.We can't have any budding little Anarchist-in-Waiting
learning what this Great Country stood for and heralded.
Instead of Trumpets we will hear the shriek of Obama's Iron Whistle
in nearly every major city.

 

Are we better off now than then? Hell yes.

[/QUOTE]

Face it ... all you lefties have are a pack of lies and spin generating
web sites designed to debunk things that aren't even factual in nature
but mere bias.
The American people no longer buy yer drool { Talking pt. Spin}
Obama is a con artist.No one forced him to make all those highfalutin
pledges and promises about creating jobs and unemployment not
going over 8%.Yes,Obama can manage somehow to have the CBO
say stuff and predict and give the OK for things that are based in lies
and Democrat derived skewed numbers.
The bottom line can't be Spun.
The dollar was Strong under Bush compared to Obama and Today.
Unemployment was Non-existent under Bush as opposed to today.
Inflation was not even an issue when Bush was President unlike Today.
Bush raised record Revenues while instituting Tax cuts and lowering
the Capital Gains rate { helping Investors }.
Under this President Capitalism is now a dirty word.The hallmark of what
once seperated this Country and made us a Superpower.
Under Obama the Marxist we'll be no different than France before long.
I'm just wondering when this Administration will see fit to have their
annual book burnings.We can't have any budding little Anarchist-in-Waiting
learning what this Great Country stood for and heralded.
Instead of Trumpets we will hear the shriek of Obama's Iron Whistle
in nearly every major city.[/QUOTE]

you are very correct, Foolardi.

The Left has been totally discredited by Obama's foolish economic policies!

 

They (and a lot of Republicans) refused to let Bush simply crush the GSE's and hand the housing mission (and profits) off to Wall Street. Congress meanwile wrote multiple bipartisan bills to address actual safety and soundness concerns. Just as in the case that Rep. Frank reported, the BUSH ADMINISTRATION shot them all down.

No, you'd still be the first, but you won't accomplish it either.

Exactly, that's called slicing off an arm to feed it to Wall Street. All of Part-X has to go private if Bush's latest Czar says it has to. Then all of Part-Y and all of Part-Z. This was one of several means by which the Bushies tried to chop up the GSE's and privatize the entire system.

And what is it that Rep. Shays is talking about here? Is he talking about any GSE program at all, any risk being run, any GSE operational reform that should be considered? You'd certainly think he must be from the way the sliced and diced video (complete with all those inserts to tell stupid people what to think) was all about. But no. Shays and everybody else in the room are talking about whether GSE accounting reports were in full compliance with newly revised FASB accounting standards. Those changes were complex for an agency as large as the GSE's. The reports had been submitted to HUD in draft form and approved. They had been reviewed by outside accountants and approved. But when they were then submitted in final form, OFHEO tried to find some quirk to pin blame on, and that is exactly ALL that OFHEO was doing. This is how Falcon ends up looking like such a dweeb on whether safety and soundness issues are involved. There aren't any. Not one. Bush couldn't get his GSE-crippling Czar scheme passed, he couldn't get his GSE-crippling portfolio limits passed, he couldn't get any of his chop up the GSE's schemes passed. But maybe they could get them on accounting irregularities, especially with a whole new FASB book to go by. And that actually worked. The GSE's were eventually forced to restate billions in income and that helped push them out of market share to the extent that by late 2006, they were at less than 25% of the market when they had been above 70% earlier in the decade. Who made up the difference? Wall Street and their "private label" shops which unlike the GSE's bought and sold anything and everything, thereby making the credit crisis a certainty.

Me and the facts have been to Niagara Falls and back. With you, the first clue (once again provided by me) hasn't sunk in yet.

But since it was the whole point to start out with, do tell me if you can, has the phony YouTube video been sliced and diced at all? Has it perhaps been selectively chopped up and edited to support an agenda? On a scale of 1-100, how good a job does the video do of representing what was actually going on per the transcript?

 

Right. We're all stupid and don't remember as far back as 2007-08. How do you get Bush-reversing legislation past wall-to-wall Republican filibusters and the Bushie veto pen again? As I said, the election of 2006 merely put handcuffs on Bush. But that was a huge improvement over what had gone on before.

The usual Zombie Lies. What a surprise.

LOL. Since you aren't up to anything more elegant, try this nice cartoon for a quick refresher on how the credit crisis came about. Aside from the glaring error of failing to distinguish between subprime lending and abuse of subprime credit markets, it does a fairly good job.

The Crisis of Credit

This economy is far better than the crippled one that Bush left behind and hugely better than the one Republicans would have turned that into had they not been thrown out on their so-deserving ears. Prelude of things to come...

 

LOL. You're talking about the wrong video now. And there are only two of them of recent note. And at that, all Rep. Frank is doing here is wringing the ugly truth of the matter out of Falcon. There were no safety and soundness issues on the table. None. It was all about bookkeeping -- whether or not this or that entry was in proper compliance with newly revised federal standards. Twisting that effort into a warning of the grave risks of GSE operations and the dire need to enact safety and soundness protections is what the stupid video tries to do, and it's complete 100% hooey!

 

Indeed, that same Bush administration agency Falcon headed, the OFHEO which had oversight responsibility over Fannie and Freddie, issued quarterly reports stating F/F were "adequately capitalized" -- right up to March 2008.

http://www.politicalforum.com/showthread.php?p=3100988&highlight=ofheo#post3100988

 

OBAMA'S STEADY DIPLOMACY ENDS 4 DECADE REIGN OF GADDAFI, AND UNLIKE BUSH IT DIDN'T COST $3T.

That's the difference between progressive presidents and conservative -- the former get results based on prudence; the later flounder around and cost us trillions in failed policies.

1000 DAYS INDEED!

 

You are very mistaken, Landru Guide Us.

Obama had nothing to do with it.

He was too busy attempting to get his foolish jobs bill passed.

And now we learn the Democrats do not even support it!

 

So, all that rot about Obama being in violation of the War Powers "Act" for starting a war in Libya was just another deliberate pack of utter right-wing lies??? Well, I never...

 

They refused the reforms need to shore up the GSE programs.

Because they didn't do what was necessary all the while Frank et al claiming there was no problem.

No I'm way down the list.

It's called getting government out of the business of mortgage speculation and forcing bad loans.

Yes.

Not even close as the evidence clearly portrays.

And you should learn what brevity is.

 

Yep right up to where we discovered they were cooking the books.

 

What legislation to reverse what Bush policy? What did he veto? Too bad they handcuffed declining deficits and full employment.

More baseless conjecture when you can't dispute the facts.

So now it's insults and cartoons you are left with..............

Where do you even get this nonsense. You attempts to hide what the Democrat policies did to the sound growing economy Bush and the Republicans gave us for 52 months is laughable at best and fools no one.

 

And lets not forget the bill that did get passed



Statement of Administration Policy: H.R. 1461 - Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2005
October 26, 2005

STATEMENT OF ADMINISTRATION POLICY



H.R. 1461 fails to include key elements that are essential to protect the safety and soundness of the housing finance system and the broader financial system at large. As a result, the Administration opposes the bill.

The regulatory regime envisioned by H.R. 1461 is considerably weaker than that which governs other large, complex financial institutions. This regime is of particular concern given that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac currently hold only about half of the capital of comparable financial institutions.

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=24851

 

Good information, Bluesguy.

Thanks for sharing.

These statements are also very revealing.

"The Bush Administration has long called for legislation to create a stronger, more effective regulatory regime to improve oversight of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Banks ("housing government-sponsored enterprises" or "housing GSEs") and appreciates the considerable efforts of Chairman Oxley and Chairman Baker in crafting H.R. 1461.

However, the dramatic growth of the housing GSEs over the last decade, as well as recent accounting and operational problems, underscore the importance of protecting the broader financial markets from systemic risks caused by their actions. The housing GSEs' outstanding debt is approximately $2.5 trillion, and they provide credit guarantees on another $2.4 trillion of mortgages. By comparison, the privately held debt of the Federal government is $4.1 trillion. Housing GSE debt is issued largely to support sizable portfolio investments that are unnecessary to fulfill the GSEs' housing mission. Given the size and importance of the GSEs, Congress must ensure that their large mortgage portfolios do not place the U.S. financial system at risk. H.R. 1461 fails to provide critical policy guidance in this area.

Source: George W. Bush: Statement of Administration Policy: H.R. 1461 - Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2005 http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=24851#ixzz1bXjA4MTh

 

More delusional thinking as expressed by the radical Left!

 

You are very correct, Bluesguy.

Obama took a bad situation and made it much worse!

 

A nice unbaised article made by a rag owned by the Barclay Bros. ... the U.K's island buying castle building , tax exiles.. they make the Koch Bros. all warm in the pants.

 

It's always somebody else's fault isn't it?

The source is biased... Bush did it... the Republicans are obstructionists... the Koch Bros are behind it... it's the Tea Party's fault.

I swear, Obama will go down in history as the president who single-handedly ruined the nation's economy... but was stll loved & respected by his supporters, nonetheless.

Why nobody knows.

​

 

So for you, I guss it is ok that the Obama break the law? Right got it.

 

I can tell you right now it cost more then 3bil like what he said it was.

 

Ha-Ha!

Funny!

Great analogy of his easily-led supporters!

The similarities are striking!