Dow Jones dropped 44% during the last 15 months of the Bush Presidency

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=%5EDJI&a=09&b=1&c=2007&d=01&e=23&f=2009&g=d&z=66&y=0

The Dow Jones peaked at 14,164 on 9 October 2007.
The Dow Jones was at 7920 on 20 January 2009.
That's a drop of 44% in 15 months.

You might want to remind all the right wingers of this when they mention that the DJIA has dropped about 550 points (7%) since Obama took office.

I am not normally like this, but you do realize most of his last 15 months was after Obama was elected (traditional logic says those who didn't trust Obama that much, might have pulled a good deal of their money out, causing stock prices to go down) and several disastrous bailouts were passed which while being signed by Bush were passed with a supermajority of Democrats and were voted against by a supermajority of Republicans. Could that have to do with any of this?

Obama was elected last November, less than 4 months ago. bu$h's last 15 months go from October 2007 to January 2009. bu$h's last 15 months include 12 1/2 months he spent occupying the White House before Obama was elected.

But that still doesn't take into account how much the stock market went down since Obama was elected, and since passing the disastrous bailout bills which MOST Republicans didn't want. It was at 11,000 in Oct. of this year when Obama starting crushing McCain in the polls. Even in Nov. it was at about 9,500. The it went straight down. So half that loss was in the last 3 months of the Bush Presidency, when it was clear Obama was winning, and when bills were being passed by the Democrats and Bush to turn the economy around... which had the opposite effect.

check the history of the DJIA and you'll see that you're quite incorrect. This has been years in the making, and Obama's only role is to have inherited it from a corrupt administration who has done everything in their power to loot the treasury, and destroy the economy for all but their cronies.

That the mortgage crisis had anything to do with this (which you would have a hard time blaming that entirely on Bush, that has been in the works through Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, and Jr here. There are very few people out there saying this crisis is ALL Bush's fault, in fact there are very few analysts out there saying that this is at all Bushes fault, as he did very little with the mortgage laws (which you can say is a bad thing, but its hard to point to directly.) To say that Bush single handedly destroyed the economy :-/.

I think he just stood aside so his 'base' could do their worst, smirking all the way, and saying over and over how great things were.

This mess started after the crash of '87. So yeah, it's not just Bush's fault, but Bush Sr., Reagan and Clinton -- our political leadership in general, both Dem and Repub, all share some of the blame.

But at this point, I'm not as concerned about blame as I am our ability to put the wheels back on. Since we no longer make things in this country, we're really up a creek.

Look what increasing spending did for Japan in the 90s, the US in the 70 (ala the Carter stagflation years), or even America in the 30s (despite what the history books say the Great Depression didn't end until WWII, there was still unemployment rates in the double digits throughout the 30s). Can we really say that its going to work this time?

again, however, both sides are guilty of spending. Neither side can claim high ground there, although Republicans have a far worse track record, at least since Nixon.

I think for far less money we could have better results. But it would require a change in the status quo thinking, which favors the top 1%. Until we start trying to honestly work together to really solve the problem, the problem will persist.

I am very interested to hear what you have to say, because I spent that entire decade as a working stiff in Japan.

Also, even if unemployment rates were in the double digits in the '30s, they would have been even HIGHER if Roosevelt hadn't pushed through his public works programs. In 1932, at the height of the Depression, unemployment was 25% thanks in part to Hoover's "prosperity is just around the corner" policy of doing basically nothing.

By the way, I knew some guys who were just entering the workforce during the '30s. A lot of them were in one of Roosevelt's work programs. And they all said that they were damn glad to have had the chance to work and earn money. The ones in the CCC also received room and board, and were even be able to send money back to their families.

The conservative economic dogma of deregulating the finance industry is what got us into this mess. And yes, a lot of Democrats including Carter and Clinton also signed onto this philiosophy in one way or another.

Every sane, sober economist in this past decade saw this housing bubble, and no one did anything about it. No one even tried to prevent it. As a leader, it was Bush's job to run the govt which meant putting people in position of power that actually believe in regulating businesses. Instead, Bush littered his govt with cronies who didn't believe in regulation, which is one of the reasons why the Madoffs of the world were allowed to con people.

All this crap with the financial markets, the fraud, caused the market to artificially inflate. The SEC was ignoring it all as far as I can tell. There are stories where people went to the SEC about Madoff and he was never investigated. He had 8 yrs to beef up that agency.

Obama was elected last November. The DOW's collapse started a year before Obama was elected.

And the democrats did not have a "supermajority" in congress back in September.

And Bush didn't have to sign a single bailout. He waited until his last year in office to exercise his veto pen. I didn't see him exercising it for the TARP mess. As I recall, he was out there pimping for his banking buddies.

considering they have half a brain. Yet, last night's Hardball on MSNBC featured Tweety Matthews having a tirade over the falling Dow. Matthews said he was mad, that the average American was mad, and that he and everyone else were getting mad at Obama. I'm serious. Matthews was turning the heat off the crooks on Wall St and turning it up on Pres Obama. This came shortly after he guested Cramer and another nutjob sounding off on how the entire Obama administration was wrong with their solutions. I guess Obama should have picked Cramer or Matthews instead of Geithner. They had all the answers last night.

I remember when either Colbert or Stewart played the clip of Cramer screaming SCREAMING into the camera "DO NOT PANIC! EVERYTHING IS FINE!" right after he read an email from a viewer asking if they should pull their money out of asset based securities such as Bear Stearns. Cramer read the email on air and about 4 days before Bear Stearns went under.