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Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Father Terrence who wrote (7387)	2/17/1998 12:09:00 PM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20981

That's for the distant future, for the immediate future: ........Consider: If Clinton is so essential to the boom, why have stocks responded to the scandal, not by falling, but by rising? Typical was Feb. 6, when newspapers reported that White House secretary Betty Currie had given damaging testimony about her boss before the grand jury. That day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up 72 points. .......But it is striking that investors are shrugging off the Lewinsky affair -- or even finding it bullish. If they believed that Clinton was vital to our economic success, wouldn't they dump stocks? .......Imagine a similar scandal placing the tenure of Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, in even the slightest doubt and that it's believed to harm his performance. Certainly, the market would fall. This thought experiment shows how important Greenspan is to the economy and the stock market. Now, try the same with the Republican Congress: What if a scandal boosted the chances that Democrats would regain the House and Senate, making Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) the speaker and Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) the chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee? I doubt markets would take a benign view. In fact, if there is another political explanation behind the behavior of the markets since the Lewinsky story broke, it is that Clinton's troubles help the GOP in the 1998 elections. In the 1974 congressional races, three months after Nixon resigned, Democrats gained 49 seats in the House and five in the Senate. That swing would give today's Republicans enough votes to break filibusters and, with help from Democratic moderates, override vetoes. Recently, a powerful correlation has existed between markets and the fortunes of Republicans in Congress. For the two years after Clinton was elected in November 1992, the Dow rose just 18 percent, or less than one percent per month. But since November 1994, when Republicans took over the House and Senate, the Dow is up 118 percent, or 3 percent per month. It's the same with long-term interest rates: In the two years after Clinton's 1992 victory, the rate on the 30-year bond rose from 7.6 percent to 8 percent. Since the GOP took Congress in 1994, it has fallen to 5.9 percent. This is not to say that Republicans deserve "the lion's share of the credit" either. America's unprecedented 15-year boom is best explained by the massive restructuring of businesses that began in the early 1980s, the spread of high technology, the monetary stewardship of Greenspan and Paul Volcker, and the worldwide enthusiasm for free markets and lower tax rates that started with Ronald Reagan and has flourished since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Clinton's legacy is that he's liberalized trade and otherwise hasn't mucked things up. Left to his own devices, he would have spent more, taxed more and nationalized health care, but constrained by Congress, he's behaved well. The economy has thrived, tax revenues have rolled in, the budget has been balanced and jobs continue to rise by 200,000 a month, a trend that began in 1983. So while Clinton's exit might be tragic in other ways, it's unlikely to dim prosperity or crack the market. This is no secret, and the Dow -- despite an unsettling volatility whose source lies in Asia -- continues to rise. washingtonpost.com

To: Father Terrence who wrote (7387)	2/17/1998 5:05:00 PM
From: Jack Clarke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20981

FT, >>With a REAL alternative to the Reps and Dems, there could be a Lib President by 2008. Sounds good to me! Jack

To: Father Terrence who wrote (7387)	2/18/1998 1:03:00 AM
From: Dean Wilson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20981

Terrence, you wrote about the need to: " . . . introduce more Jeffersonian principles" into a political party. From what I know of Jefferson and 'Jeffersonian principles' and from my perception of us 20th century Americans, a political party that wholeheartedly embraced such principles would quickly be dismissed as too radical. Nonetheless, to date I've run across one political party which seems to champion some Jeffersonian principles that most Americans would scoff at: The U.S. Taxpayers Party. Are there other such parties? Dean