To: Art Bechhoefer who wrote (19064 ) 2/11/2001 7:38:12 PM From: hueyone Read Replies (3) | Respond to Art, It is clear to anyone who listened to the fourth quarter CCs for their tech investments that the slowdown began in earnest in year 2000 under President Clinton. Even so, I do not regard the slowdown as a Clinton, Bush, democratic or republican slowdown. It is simply a downturn in the business cycle that is bound to happen at some point no matter who is in the oval office and no matter how astute their economic policies are. Regardless, imho, the most influential person with regard to economic expansion or economic contraction is Greenspan. But federal monetary policy is an imperfect art, not a science, and we were lucky the last economic expansion lasted as long as it did---(although it could also be argued that length of the last economic expansion was also a curse because the pain of unwinding the excess liquidity from this long expansion is worse than it would have been if we already had endured some more minor economic slowdowns along the way). Regardless, the notion that the government or federal reserve can permanently engineer the death of business cycles is a fallacious one.
