#1, If Bill Clinton should have somehow been able to prevent a stock market bubble, it implies Presidents can and should control the stock market. Pray tell how? Perhaps he should have implemented a Presidential decree banning trading in stocks with no earnings? Or waved his magic wand and caused investors not to invest in over-hyped stocks?

#2, the dot.com bubble burst in 2000, but the stock market was relatively stable from mid 2000-Sept 11, 2001, when it collapsed. I don't know why George Bush didn't prevent that collapse, since Presidents can control the stock market.

#3, if Clinton WAS bad for the long-term economy, it wasn't his strong dollar policies that are the reason. It was his signing of NAFTA and WTO. Those policies have and will do far more damage to America and American workers long-term than a strong dollar.

edited to change title. After reading more about Mr Baker, I should have insulted him. I agree with 90% of what he believes. Just not in this instance.

And Greenspan, libertarian and Ayn Rand acolyte, was known for the "Greenspan put" -- easy money anytime the stock market started to falter.

The Washington Post
November 12, 2000, Sunday, Final Edition
BEHIND THE BOOM
A Republican Fed chairman and a Democratic president might have seemed strange bedfellows. But Alan Greenspan and Bill Clinton became the best of partners and the economy soared

By Bob Woodward


http://users.dickinson.edu/~rudaleva/greenspan.htm

As the article also points out, Lloyd Bentsen, former Senator from Texas and a fiscal conservative was Clinton's first Treasury Secretary.

The bullshit call is not a hard one to make.

The author gives Clinton zero credit for record gains in the stock market on his watch, yet blames him for the bubble collapsing. You can't find nonsense this good in freeperville.

The gains were illusions, fakes, bubbles. Internet domain names and start-up that were worth billions of dollars but instead where worth pennies were used to increase the tax revenue of the country and then the burst(or correction) revealed the true nature of the economy

Just imagine if Bush's term ended in 2006 and Obama took over in Jan 2007, imagine what the repubs will be saying about Bush and how he gave us low unemployment and small deficits. You cannot built your economic foundation of paper and then wonder why nobody gives you credit for doing a solid job.

Please explain how Bill is 0% reponsible for stock market gains, yet 100% responsible for stock market losses.

If the stock market gains were all "illusions, fakes" as you say, please also explain how the DJIA was 3,241.95 when Clinton took office and 10,021.57 on Dec 31, 2001 after the dot-com bubble had collapsed.

I'll add that Glass-Stegall came to Clinton as veto-proof. I therefore, do not blame Clinton for its passage, in fact, good on him for allowing himself to watch it in action a little longer.

With the decline of the middle class over the past 30 years, the moments of "prosperity" for many are conteracted with increases in the cost of living. We haven't enjoyed the propserity of those of the 50s and 60s...steady rising incomes and standards of living. Younger folks never have experienced a truly beneficial economy...only times where things were ok as opposed to sucking.

competition that the boom started to create. IOW, he was working for the billionaire's agenda, not the people's.

What's wrong with this picture?

Sure, Clinton did some bad things, but his tax increases staved off the government melt down for 8 years and actually balanced the budget. That ain't hay.

The repealing of the Glass Steagall act

that was to the whole collapse.

I was still in school.

As Lloyd Bentsen said in the 1988 VP debate 'anybody can write hot checks to give the illusion of prosperity.'

decades, but there are just too few Americans with any understanding of economics to stop it. They believe that the illusion of prosperity is the same as prosperity, that stripping the carcass is equivalent to creating wealth.

No, reagan killed the old economy and Clinton killed the new one that was supposed to replace it.

have a heaping helping of irony:

"Henry Blodget (born 1966) is an American former equity research analyst, currently banned from the securities industry, who was senior Internet analyst for CIBC Oppenheimer during the dot-com bubble and the head of the global Internet research team at Merrill Lynch. Blodget is now the editor and CEO of The Business Insider, a business news and analysis site, and a host of Yahoo Daily Ticker, a finance show on Yahoo."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Blodget

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_P._Ryan

in any case, how was Bill Clinton responsible for the stock market high tech bubble? that's an absurd claim. and hindsight, of course, is a fabulous thing. I'm not great Bill Clinton fan, but people were better off under his economic leadership than either bush pere or fils.

... I don't care if the source was Satan himself or Mother Teresa. What MATTERS is whether the information is accurate, the analysis makes sense, and stuff like that.

I might be slightly more suspicious of a source I don't like, but to treat information as valueless based on the source is not that smart IMHO.

The facts as I see them are simple: we had a great economy under Clinton but his policies made damn sure that it could not continue. Opening one way trade floodgates with China, NAFTA, dismantling banking and other financial regulation - all have a huge hand in today's problems.

Folks who think that only Republicans have taken us to the messed up place we are at are either quite ignorant or intellectually dishonest. Republicans are worse, but only a bit as of late.

economy in my lifetime. He admitted his mistakes, such as repealing Glass-Stegall and didn't favor the 1% at the long term expense of everyone else.

And if the aforementioned person often posts Democrat-bashing articles, the ring gets louder.

too. lots of mistakes. all mistakes that no democratic president would have made if he were abiding by principle.

Favored the 1% over everyone else in the long term. Some mistakes he continues to stand behind like welfare deform and "free trade".

Clinton seeded/expanded structural flaws because he was true to his neoliberal ideology.

under both D & R presidents.

(and no, I'm not going to spend my time searching for the statistic for this revisionist thread).

and the slowly declining line at the bottom?

I will say that there were dramatic wage increases as all incomes saw a rise during the Clinton years. also there were social safety net programs advanced by Clinton like the EIC which may have served to close the gap some. I do see that most of the inequality occurred during the first two years of his term.

got workfare & "five years & off".

& earned income credit was Nixon, not clinton, though clinton expanded it.

i think his record was very mixed

the economy for most Americans improved.

I'd go back there in a heartbeat.

so striking.

there were jobs, however, once the it boom got rolling (early clinton years were depressed)

but poverty levels were higher than they were in the 70s (and have risen even more since, thanks in part to welfare reform, free trade, etc.)

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104525.html

I thrived in it. I'd give anything to go back to those days of opportunity and upward mobility. you're correct that there were areas of income which were negatively affected, but the economy was booming. Almost every demographic saw their incomes rise during his two terms. The poverty rate plunged; wages increased for most average Americans; infant mortality dropped; much more. There were certainly mistakes made by the legislature during his time in office, but the economy boomed. You can't go back and erase history. Clinton's economy rocked!

I will never think of him as anything other than basically an anti-gun repug.

Last edited Fri Jun 8, 2012, 02:12 PM - Edit history (3)

The irony here is that my most controversial theory about the economy is that I believe that 1996-2008 was a unified asset bubble. I am more in agreement with Baker in some of his observations than most people are.

But to lay all that at Clinton's feet suggests an emotional agenda.


Asset bubbles require relatively-low interest rates. But so does general GDP growth. All presidents want relatively-low interest rates. If that is a mistake it is a universal mistake, not something Clinton thought up.

The combination of astonishing once-in-a-generation (or even lifetime) technology driven productivity gains and government moving from deficit to surplus and Greenspan's stock friendliness all combined to make the internet bubble.

Similar productivity gains (like railroads) have typically done the same, when occurring in low rate environments that made bubbles possible.

What did NOT cause the internet bubble was repealing Glass-Steagall, since things that happen in 1999 do not typically cause things that happened in 1997.

The suggestion that a president can deflate a bubble is far-fetched. The idea that any president WOULD deflate a bubble is absurd. No president would. None.

The job of deflating the bubble was Greenspan's job, and that's the bulk of Clinton's contribution to the formation of the bubble. He reappointed Greenspan. A fair charge.

Again, no president will ever say, "I think we need to shave a few points off GDP because I think the stock market is doing too well."

Since no president is ever going to do that you subtract that from both sides of the equation.

In terms of what was specific to Clinton, and unlike Reagan, Bush I and Bush II, the government did a better than average job within the bubble environment.


We had a bubble under Clinton. We had a bubble under Bush II. Neither man created those bubbles single-handedly.

During the Clinton bubble workers made almost all the gains they have made since 1980 and tax revenues were way up.

During the Bush II bubble workers made no gains and the deficit doubled.

If the author wants to write a general economic piece about the relationship between low interest rates and asset bubbles, and that what business always wants in the short term is destabilizing in the long term, and question what all presidents think in terms of basic assumptions, that's fine.

But this piece is just a tantrum.

basically haven't made any gains except in the top 20%.

If it were not for the 1990s workers would be well below the 1980 level, not merely flat with it. Most average-folks gains of the 1990s were given back in the 2000s.

The 1992-2000 was not a worker's paradise, but it was the best period for workers from 1980-2012

part of the reason wages have fallen again is because of policies instituted during the clinton era, while everyone was congratulating themselves on how well they were doing. specifically, telecom bill, free trade agreements, welfare deform, glass-steagall, etc.

year.

Thanks in advance.