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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (147909)	10/22/2010 7:57:33 PM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 543023

Good find.

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (147909)	10/22/2010 9:23:39 PM
From: Sam	Respond to of 543023

Steve, FWIW, Warren Buffett thought that the stimulus should have been much bigger too. Here is an excerpt from an interview that I posted recently. Since there were no comments on it, I guess no one read it. Talking about the recovery and unemployment: On the $64,000 question -- whether the recovery was real -- Buffett has no doubt. "Yes," he says, "it's a recovery. It's a slow recovery, but it's a recovery. We're calling back some people at Burlington Northern. We are still letting a few go in other businesses, but we see a pickup in business of heavy users of American Express (AXP, Fortune 500), in freight car loadings at BNSF -- across our businesses, we see slow recovery." "When would you start hiring a lot more people?" I ask him. "When demand picks up," he says. "We don't hire because we get a tax break or because someone in the government tells us to. We hire when there's more demand for what we are making or moving or selling. It's that simple." "Where will the demand come from if a business as big as yours is being so cautious?" I ask. "It's already coming," he says. "It's already happening, and it will pick up. Look," he adds, "we needed a really big stimulus in the fall of 2008 -- a really, really big stimulus. We didn't get it. It was a miracle that Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) bought Merrill for $29 when it was probably worth 29 cents if left on its own for a few days. If that hadn't happened, everything would have collapsed. The whole commercial-paper market would have stopped. Every domino would have fallen. Berkshire (BRKA, Fortune 500) would have been the last, but it would have fallen too. Ken Lewis saved the whole system for a while, until TARP could rescue it. But now we're just going to get a very slow recovery because people are still scared. But we are seeing recovery, definitely." "How about in housing?" "That recovery is still a long way off. That market got way out of equilibrium, and it's going to take a long while for it to get fixed."