Despite the anti-regulatory stance of the Bush administration the stock market went straight down from 2000 to 2003. The market rallied nicely on the back of the Iraq war but eventually took out the lows, and Bush left not knowing if Wall Street would even be standing when his successor took office. You count up all the love the market gave Bush, and all the grief the market gave Clinton, and then look at the results and you have a negative correlation.

Markets have grown less transparent over the years, which is another negative correlation. Seems to me the markets are signalling something different than the rhetoric suggests.

Evidently Neocons have short memories, which are not part of their reptilian brains, anyway. What I want to know is why isnt NORTH KOREA REALLY CHINA'S PROBLEM?????

UNLESS THEY ARE A SURROGATE ROGUE (COMMUNIST) NATION. Put that in your NeoCon pipe and smoke it.

The work force is larger than anyone thinks it is, and the number of workers eligible for benefits has shrunk. When the housing bubble first started to crater, the pollyannas swore it wasn't happening, because the employment numbers didn't support the slowdown. The number of illegal and green card workers in construction aren't counted. Then people move down the career ladder, and they aren't counted either. The jobs demographic now includes a number of workers who don't work for a living wage, family members, roomates, etc. Marginal workers compete with primary wage earners. To go back to the fruit pickers in California, in the prequel to this, we see many of the same things, and family dislocation, divorce, etc.

The damage to the social fabric of this country will be in most ways the most serious outcome, and in middle class terms the result is children who do not have it as good as their parents, who will never be able to earn and save money, and face a future in which their status as parents is greatly diminished.

To transpose the 1930's in that film to present, note the smoke stacks and factories are in China. Note that China is stock piling commodities ahead of inflation, and there is no guarantee, even if the inflationary policy that the Fed has taken were to work, that the US consumer could afford those products, (since we are no longer in a vertical economy), or that the Chinese would continue to trade with us, assuming the dollar remains weak, and there is no real reason to expect the dollar to strenghten, unless interest rates move higher, and that would cut off the line of credit to home equity, so we are in a very different situation, pursuing a policy which didn't work then, and won't work now, for obvious reasons.

There is another economic bull market (cyclical probably) waiting out there, if the leadership can nationalize the CC companies, or give them GSE status. I don't know why Helicopter Ben would drop money from the sky when he could mail them all a debit card? Where does the money come from, well taxpayers you say. Ha, clueless you are truly.

This country runs on the deficit spending model, and I made this point during the last election, when I started the Free Gasoline For Everybody Party, which said this, that GWB would have done a lot better if he had just given the American people a few trillion in energy subsidies, added that money onto the budget deficit (government borrows the money at about 3%, which is ten times less than you pay the CC company sometimes) and left Iraq alone.

But GWB was an idiot.If you need to borrow money, Uncle Sam gets the best rates.

I'm merely parroting Greenspan on the matter, creating consumer demand, creates more product, more production, more economic growth. I know a lot of smart guys don't buy into this.. This is an attempt to describe what's happening, and to speculate just how far they can go before the smart guys are proven correct. It's also true that one guy who spends a hundred consumer dollars is equal to a hundred guys who spend one consumer dollar, and economies are built by politicians who adjust the formula according to their own ideology. Without bread and circus the poor grow restless, the privileged resent supporting them, and you have a revolution.

Somewhere along the line you might expect the underclass to vote their own self interest, but most of them would rather play the lottery, until the bills come due, and life becomes unbearable. The poor have no ideology I guess.

The downside is that the public thinks corporations serve their interests. They buy dinner at a fast food place, because groceries cost too much. Irony, it is only when they start to think like the privileged class that they will break the cycle of impoverishment. (The privileged class doesn't dream about hitting the lottery)