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Politics : Right Wing Extremist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (2735)	1/20/2001 10:59:15 AM
From: sandintoes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 59480

At least some of the people are giving credit where it is due. I'm so glad we won't have to watch that man take credit for inventing the wheel. With Clinton's Economy, Spread the Credit Around Tuesday, January 16, 2001 By Molly Falconer Bill Clinton won the White House in part by reminding his campaign staff: "It's the economy, stupid!" Well, he told them so. He presided over the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, and made a point of stressing his economic legacy in his final weeks in office. In a farewell speech Thursday night, he reminded the country that "America has done well. Our economy is breaking records with more than 22 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment in 30 years, the highest home ownership ever." During his eight years in office, whatever else happened — budget battles and government shutdowns, sex scandals and White House sleepovers — the economic numbers always worked for Clinton. The Nasdaq, S&P and Dow averages all tripled in value during his eight years in office. But who really deserves the credit? That depends on who’s talking. Richard Clarida, Chairman of Columbia University Economics Department and a former economics advisor to Ronald Reagan, says it was the balanced budget agreement with the Republican Congress that spurred the economy by holding down inflation and interest rates. And it didn’t hurt, Clarida says, that "Clinton came into the Presidency when people had a lot of anxiety about the economy — but in fact the economy was growing and recovering nicely from a downturn." Christine Callies, the Chief U.S. Investment Strategist at Merrill Lynch, also spreads the credit widely. "I think everybody deserves a little bit of credit for keeping this bull running for ten years — maybe even George Bush Senior," she says. The past eight years saw the birth, and bust, of an entirely new economy — the dotcom and technology revolution. Trillions of dollars in wealth was created, and despite the recent clouds, innovations in the field have fueled unprecedented gains in productivity. Some say Clinton may have been lucky — or just smart enough to get out of the way and leave Alan Greenspan to do his work. He’s the one who really left his mark on the economy, says Clarida. "If you are going to have one individual it is Alan Greenspan" he says. "He has presided over monetary policy." Others say global market forces and increased capitalism bolstered the U.S. economy — and President Clinton deserves credit for opening the barriers to free trade, going to bat early on for unpopular initiatives like the financial bail-out of Mexico and free trade in the Americas. Former Clinton Economic Advisor Laura D'Andrea Tyson says the outgoing president had "a tremendous commitment to leadership in free trade. This has been a decade when countries around the world have embraced market opening." But despite Clinton’s rosy speeches of late, recession is a very real possibility and no one can deny that the clouds formed on the Clinton watch. Rising oil prices, a sagging stock market and stingy consumers all have economists muttering the dreaded R-word: recession. "What we're faced with is an economy that's going to slow aggressively," says Paddy Jilek the Director of US Economics at Credit Suisse First Boston. "That's really the key thing on investors minds right now — not so much how far and how fast the economy will go down, but how fast it will come back."