Winners and Losers in the Obama Bernanke QE Game

Posted by Tina

You may recall that the big complaint under GW Bush was that the middle class was not going anywhere while the “rich got richer”. Snide remarks about relationships between corporate America and the Bush administration were also plentiful during the Bush years. The economy, which hummed along at an even pace after recovery from the Clinton recession and 911, was said to be the “worst economy ever”.


Then along came the longest political campaign in history with Obama promising hope and change. People were excited…at last fairness would prevail and prosperity would return to the middle class!

After two years of Democrat super majority hope and change control in Congress and Quantitative Easing times 2 the middle class is still in bad shape following the recession and housing crash. According to hope and change theory the middle class should be sitting pretty by now…but it’s still in deep trouble with a number of people much worse off than they’ve ever been before. Amazingly Wall Street and big banks are doing better than ever. In fact we can now say with absolute conviction… the rich ARE getting richer!

Hope, change and QE2 was supposed to turn things around for the middle class and provide the poor with a nice little prosperity boomlet. Instead the poor are competing with many of their middle class neighbors for jobs and food stamps.

If the latest reports are any indication, there isn’t much chance things will improve any time soon.

Here’s the ugly truth:

Townhall.com

The Fed is winding down Ben Bernanke’s experiment in money printing called “QE2”. He trumpets his success saying that QE2 has pointed the U.S. economy “in the right direction.” But did it really? It turns out that QE2 has created maybe 700,000 full-time jobs, but at a cost of about $850,000 for each job.

All QE2 did was create a boom in the stock market. Wall Street bankers reaped millions while the average investors barely made back some small amount of the money that they lost during the 2008 crash.

We believe this boom is an easy money mirage. As MarketWatch.com reports, “But even the stock market boom hasn’t been what it appears. An analysis shows that most of the rise in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index under QE2 has simply been a result of the decline in the dollar in which shares are measured. Measured in hard currencies, the stock market boom has been much less impressive. In Swiss francs, the S&P has risen by just 8.4% since Aug. 27. In currencies like the Swedish krone and Australian dollars it’s even less. Measured in gold, the S&P 500 is up just 4.5%.”

And that’s not all. The housing market continues to be a problem with new foreclosures making it continually worse.

All attempts to point these things out to our liberal progressive friends are futile…like talking to the hand. They refuse to admit it isn’t working. I scratch my head in wonder. Unemployment is high and particularly high for blacks, new grads, teens and men. The left claims to be a champion of the poor and the down and out so I have to ask, are they just trying for higher numbers? It’s so bad out there that people are starting to whisper the “D” word.

Conservative Republicans are coming up with a lot of ideas to help the economy grow and put more money in the pockets of all American citizens. Larry Kudlow tells us about House majority Leader Eric Cantor’s ideas here: “Cantor is restoring the supply-side incentive model of economic growth. Forget tax-the-rich class warfare. Throw out wild-eyed government-spending stimulus and dollar-depreciating Fed money-pumping. Make it pay more after tax to work, produce, and invest. Go for a growth spurt, something the economy badly needs.”

It’s time to put the free market to work for all Americans so we can get back to work building a vibrant economy. Government can’t do it. Vote wisely in 2012

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4 Responses to Winners and Losers in the Obama Bernanke QE Game

  1. Quentin Colgan says:

    “According to hope and change theory the middle class should be sitting pretty by now…”
    By now? In only two years????
    Nobody–in their right mind–believed it could have been done in only two years!
    Nobody.

  2. Tina says:

    Incredulity doesn’t cover for the fact that this President has been wrong in his approach to recovery or that it isn’t working.

    And if real recovery, including jobs and economic growth wasn’t the plan why did they spend all that money?

    Of course they thought it would cause the economy to recover! And the media has done its best to put a positive spin on it for them.

    February 2009
    http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Economy/story?id=6894750&page=1

    Obama Signs Stimulus To Jump Start Economic Recovery

    “Today does not mark the end of our economic troubles,” Obama said today at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. “Nor does it constitute all of what we must do to turn our economy around. But it does mark the beginning of the end the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for Americans scrambling in the wake of layoffs; to provide relief for families worried they won’t be able to pay next month’s bills; and to set our economy on a firmer foundation, paving the way to long-term growth and prosperity.”

    Most recoveries following recession have taken an average of eighteen months. We aren’t even close to recovery and may be headed for depression after more than two years. Unemployment is still high. These policies have failed miserably and put us all in deep dept.

  3. Quentin Colgan says:

    “Incredulity doesn’t cover for the fact that this President has been wrong in his approach to recovery or that it isn’t working.”
    Do tell.
    And you got your degree in economics from where?

    “And the media has done its best to put a positive spin on it for them.

    February 2009 . . . . . ”
    You post a story from two-and-a-half years ago to prove your assertion?
    Do you have ANY evidence the media is STILL doing its best to put a positive spin on it?
    Any at all?

    Do you have ANY evidence to prove some other idea might have worked?
    I have seen you tout the Ryan plan–which cannot work unless unemployment drops to 4%–which isn’t going to happen. Just exactly how much do you know about Central Banking? How much power do you think the president actually has over the Fed?
    Do you have the SLIGHTEST idea of what you are talking about?
    Can you do anything other than parrot the race baiters?

  4. Tina says:

    Given the state of our economy and prospects for improvement there should be some OUTRAGE! Where is the outrage?

    Unemployment has been high, and getting worse, for two yearsits outrageously high for certain segments of the population. Where is the outrage? Home foreclosures continue and the numbers of homes on the market remains high. The building industry is nearly dead. Where is the outrage? More Americans are on food stamps than ever before and veterans and graduating college students are moving back home with mom and dad because they cant find work. Where is the outrage?

    Do you have ANY evidence the media is STILL doing its best to put a positive spin on it?
    Any at all?

    This is the best the New York Times could muster today –

    A month ago, when an initial gauge of first-quarter economic growth came in surprisingly weak, many policy makers and economists expected the bad news to prove fleeting.

    Suprisingly weak? What was so surprising about itand if it was a surprise why not express some alarm?

    Expectations of fleeting bad news? Were they really expecting the bad news to be fleeting after two years of worsening conditions for businesses and the unemployed?

    This is SF Gate on the economy under Bush 2004-

    Last week’s dismal report on job creation — a scant 32,000 jobs created versus 240,000 expected — left our re-election-seeking president little wiggle room on the economic front. “Economic growth is strong and getting stronger,” Bush told a gathering of minority journalists after the jobs number was released. It can’t be easy to have to defend your economic policies when all evidence suggests that average Americans are worse off today than they were four years ago.

    Bushs economy was described as dismal and the worst since the Great Depression. (Carters was much worse!!!)But this became a theme of the left and the media: Donna Brazile on ABCs This Week – “working people” are suffering more than at any time since the Great Depression!

    Unemployment in 2000 was 4.0%. By 2004 it had only risen to 5.7% and averaged over Bushs entire 8 years around 5.3% (Full employment is acknowledged at 4.0%)

    Obama has sustained unemployment at 9-10% (higher in some areas) and there is NO OUTRAGE!

    Do you have ANY evidence to prove some other idea might have worked?blah blah blah

    “It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now … Cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.”

    John F. Kennedy, Nov. 20, 1962, president’s news conference

    “Lower rates of taxation will stimulate economic activity and so raise the levels of personal and corporate income as to yield within a few years an increased not a reduced flow of revenues to the federal government.”

    John F. Kennedy, Jan. 17, 1963, annual budget message to the Congress, fiscal year 1964

    Read more: John F. Kennedy on taxes http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?article_id=39517#ixzz1NycNMXwb

    History and the opinions of noted economists have provided evidence that different policies have worked better to support economic stability and growth. They have likewise recorded the failures of policies being tried by the current administration. I have NEVER passed myself off as an expert, Quentin, which is why I post what experts in the field are saying and have said.

    Heres a sample of links…reading that might prove interesting. Much of it is from the Bush era so you can even avoid the partisan freak out.

    History first:

    http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2010/01/Why-Government-Spending-Does-Not-Stimulate-Economic-Growth-Answering-the-Critics

    The fact that government failed to spend its way to prosperity is not an isolated incident:

    During the 1930s, New Deal lawmakers doubled federal spending–yet unemployment remained above 20 percent until World War II.

    Japan responded to a 1990 recession by passing 10 stimulus spending bills over 8 years (building the largest national debt in the industrialized world)–yet its economy remained stagnant.

    In 2001, President Bush responded to a recession by “injecting” tax rebates into the economy. The economy did not respond until two years later, when tax rate reductions were implemented.

    In 2008, President Bush tried to head off the current recession with another round of tax rebates. The recession continued to worsen.

    Now, the most recent $787 billion stimulus bill was intended to keep the unemployment rate from exceeding 8 percent. In November, it topped 10 percent.[2]

    Economists and experts:

    http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9918

    http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=12745

    http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/uncertainty-more-than-anecdotal/

    http://mises.org/daily/3585

    http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Mises-Economics-Blog/2010/0722/Hoover-s-dam-folly-Why-Keynesian-New-Deal-policies-failed

    http://beta.mises.org/daily/1345

    http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2005/03/The-Impact-of-Government-Spending-on-Economic-Growth

    http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=1101

    http://www.opposingviews.com/i/cato-institute-does-some-fact-checking

    http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=12219

    http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/new-zealand-cuts-corporate-tax-rate/

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