Thursday, February 28, 2008
Cause of U.S. Recession?
With a slowdown in business, the fall of the U.S. dollar, massive layoffs, and foreclosures reaching epidemic proportions, the real cause of the recession is known by many outside of the U.S..The Australian:
IRAQ WAR 'CAUSED SLOWDOWN IN THE US'
THE Iraq war has cost the US 50-60 times more than the Bush administration predicted and was a central cause of the sub-prime banking crisis threatening the world economy, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
The former World Bank vice-president yesterday said the war had, so far, cost the US something like $US3trillion ($3.3 trillion) compared with the $US50-$US60-billion predicted in 2003......
....The war was now the second-most expensive in US history after World War II and the second-longest after Vietnam, he said.
The spending on Iraq was a hidden cause of the current credit crunch because the US central bank responded to the massive financial drain of the war by flooding the American economy with cheap credit....
Just like the Bush administration tried to stop a recent story from airing on 60 Minutes, the White House has worked to keep the truth about the war and so many other things from the American public.....* Most of us are aware that the rise of gasoline prices, food, and other goods certainly helped push the nation toward recession. People don't buy cars, if they've lost jobs and their health insurance coverage. While Wall Street and the oil companies went hog wild, the Bush administration looked the other way.
Here is an excerpt from Bret Thompson's Blog at ProgressOhio, that shows some prominent members of the Ohio GOP still don't understand economics:
...Not to be missed, is outgoing Speaker Jon Husted's (R-Columbus) willfully ignorant, self-serving take on the matter:
Seemingly all of America's financial systems are a wreck and Husted pins the blame on the one huge financial instrument that played no direct role, credit cards...."The financial crisis America is in is because its government, its businesses and its people lived beyond their means by borrowing and running up their credit cards," Husted said.
Credit cards? Husted doesn't understand that the economists were talking about the credit crisis not credit cards.
>>>Here is still more on the horrible economic disaster brought to us by the Bush administration.
CNN:
...Employers cut 533,000 jobs from their payrolls in November, the biggest monthly decline since 1974, and far more than the 325,000 cuts that Wall Street economists were expecting. Meanwhile, September's and October's job losses were revised up, bringing the three-month decline to 1.3 million, the largest three-month job loss total since World War II....
...The unemployment rate, generated by a separate survey, rose to 6.7% in November from 6.5% in the previous month. It was short of the 6.8% economists were expecting, but still brought the unemployment rate to the highest level in 15 years.
The report is maybe one of the worst the Bureau of Labor Statistics has ever produced in its 124-year history, Commissioner Keith Hall told lawmakers Friday at a Joint Economic Committee hearing.....
Does the Bush administration take any blame for this? Hell, no. In an interview with some TV news anchor, Bush blamed his predecessors. Inauguration Day can't come fast enough.
