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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ManyMoose who wrote (1025)	11/12/2008 2:53:09 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 103300

The point is... there are formal definitions for economic terms such as "recession". In America a recession is defined as a 'significant down-turn in the economy over two or more consecutive quarters' (NBER), but it is also popularly regarded as a 'serious down-turn into negative GNP for two or more quarters'. Though I suppose that partisan political gunslingers can try to SPIN things anyway that they like... still there will be no denying (I say "will be" because the official government economic statistics are constantly being revised/corrected after-the-fact, often for SEVERAL QUARTERS, before they are considered 'correct' and not revised any further...) among serious economists that the economic down-turn began in the US either at the end of '07, or else early in '08. (Some actually argue that the past seven years or so has ALL been one giant "Bear Market" that is only now, hopefully, drawing near to a close... and that it was only what the traders call a "suckers rally" after the Internet/Nasdaq bust and recession at the beginning of the first Dubbya term.) I posted a chart here the other day which showed that much of our GNP since the '01 recession was merely a 'false dawn' caused by equity withdrawals from folks home mortgages - which could not continue for long. And that --- once the equity withdrawals from mortgages were backed-out of the statistics --- the first two or three years of Bush's first term fall into recession (negative GNP), while the years since would only show 1 or 2 or 3% growth, a weak recovery, at best. Bush really lucked-out that the consumers were able to draw money out of their mortgages for as long as they did. (But it was not a solid, sustainable growth model.) ....The red bars show how the economy would look without that borrowing power. George Bush would most likely have been a one-term president, as the economy would have been in a serious recession for two years, followed by a very slow recovery of less than a 1% growth in GDP in 2003-04. Unemployment would have been dismally high. Message 25160721