Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (833908)	2/2/2015 4:32:34 PM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1579826

rat is just playing chase the squirrel around the yard with you. it's what they do because they can't argue the facts

To: i-node who wrote (833908)	2/2/2015 4:38:36 PM
From: Wharf Rat	1 Recommendation Recommended By bentway Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1579826

"If you say that, you get the trillion, and the economy continues to get worse for years to come, then you failed." The economy began to get better shortly after the stimulus passed. Also, they didn't spend a trillion, or even 0.83 T. One third was tax cuts, one third to states, some of which they used to balance their budgets. Only 1/3 was actual spending. Once again: Yes, the stimulus worked. jobs See if you can spot the point where the stimulus began. (Jeffrey Frankel) By Michael Hiltzik Amazingly, there are still some holdouts in the political and economic community who insist that the Obama stimulus failed--that is, failed to arrest a steep fall in economic output and launch a period of growth in gross domestic product, jobs, stock market valuations, and other metrics that continues to this day. Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin and Jeffrey Frankel of Harvard (and a former Clinton administration economics advisor) have just ganged up on the stimulus deniers. Their analyses are timely, since the stimulus has just passed its fifth birthday: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed into law on Feb. 17, 2009. Chinn observes (and shows his work via a series of telling slides) that the launch of ARRA coincides almost exactly with the bottoming out of the stock market, the reversal of a trend of increasing negative GDP growth and an almost unbroken record of positive growth since the end of the first quarter of 2009. "The burden of proof," he writes, "lies on those who assert the beginning of the recovery is due to anything, anything (Fed balance sheet expansion, TARP — both implemented six months earlier –, sunspots, or the return of Ancient Aliens) but the policies implemented by the Obama Administration." He even cites a dyed-in-the-wool conservative Republican economist, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, as telling nay-sayers to get serious, already: "It’s pretty tough to throw a trillion dollars at the U.S. economy, and not do something, and so the whole notion that somehow this had no effect is badly misplaced," Holtz-Eakin told an audience at the Natonal Assn. for Business Economics earlier this week. Frankel chides his fellow economists for damning the stimulus with faint praise, explaining that it "wasn't big enough," or that the Great Recession would have been worse without it, or that it was unwisely cut short by Congress in 2010. Such comments, Frankel observes, look like attempts to explain away the absence of a visible positive effect. Listening to these arguments, one would think that no effect of the Obama stimulus could be seen by the naked eye in the U.S. economic statistics of 2009. Nothing could be further from the truth." Rather, he shows, the effect on job figures, GDP and financial market indicators "could not have been much more immediate." His chart on job growth is reproduced above. As we enter year six of the stimulus era, with yet another disappointing reading on GDP, it's important to keep all that in mind: The stimulus works, it should have been bigger, and the impulse to replace it with austerity measures has done nothing but hurt workers and businesses. Anyone who claims otherwise doesn't know how to read an economic chart, or doesn't want to. latimes.com