posted April 09, 2010 11:43 PM         

"If Obama was a Republican, we would hear a never-ending drumbeat of news stories about markets voting in favor of the President," says one economic strategist.

By Mike Dorning

updated 9:58 a.m. PT, Fri., April 9, 2010
It's never easy to separate politics from policy, and the past 18 months have only increased the degree of difficulty. The U.S. has been through a historic financial crisis followed by a historic election and a series of historic federal gambles — from bailing out AIG and GM to passing a $787 billion stimulus and a $940 billion health-care reform bill. All that risk has made policy more complicated and politics more fraught ("You lie," "Baby killer").

A Bloomberg national poll in March found that Americans, by an almost 2-to-1 margin, believe the economy has gotten worse rather than better during the past year. The Market begs to differ. While President Obama's overall job approval rating has fallen to a new low of 44 percent, according to a CBS News Poll, down five points from late March, the judgment of the financial indexes has turned resoundingly positive. [The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index is up more than 74 percent from its recessionary low in March 2009. Corporate bonds have been rallying for a year. Commodity prices have surged. International currency markets have been bullish on the dollar for months, raising it by almost 10 percent since Nov. 25 against a basket of six major currencies. Housing prices have stabilized. Mortgage rates are low. "We've had a phenomenal run in asset classes across the board," says Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist for Miller Tabak + Co., an institutional trading firm in New York. "If Obama was a Republican, we would hear a never-ending drumbeat of news stories about markets voting in favor of the President."

Little more than a year ago, financial markets were in turmoil, major auto companies were on the verge of collapse and economists such as Paul Krugman were worried about the U.S. slumbering through a Japan-like Lost Decade. While no one would claim that all the pain is past or the danger gone, the economy is growing again, jumping to a 5.6 percent annualized growth rate in the fourth quarter of 2009 as businesses finally restocked their inventories. The consensus view now calls for 3 percent growth this year, significantly higher than the 2.1 percent estimate for 2010 that economists surveyed by Bloomberg News saw coming when Obama first moved into the Oval Office.

The U.S. manufacturing sector has expanded for eight straight months, the Business Roundtable's measure of CEO optimism reached its highest level since early 2006, and in March the economy added 162,000 jobs — more than it had during any month in the past three years. "There is more business confidence out there," says Boeing CEO Jim McNerney. "This Administration deserves significant credit."

It is worth stepping back to consider, in cool-headed policy terms, how all of this came to be — and whether the Obama team's approach amounts to a set of successful emergency measures or a new economic philosophy: Obamanomics.

For most of the past two decades, the reigning economic approach in Democratic circles has been Rubinomics, a set of priorities fashioned in the 1990s by Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary, Robert E. Rubin, the former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Broadly, Rubinomics was a three-legged stool consisting of restrained government spending, lower budget deficits, and open trade, which were meant in combination to reassure financial markets, keep capital flowing, and thus put the country on a path to prosperity.

On the surface, Obamanomics couldn't be more different. The Administration racked up record deficits as it pursued a $787 billion fiscal stimulus on top of the $700 billion bailout fund for banks and carmakers. Obama has done close to nothing to expand free trade. And while Clinton pleased the markets with a moderate, probusiness image, Obama has riled Wall Street with occasional bursts of populist rhetoric, such as his slamming of "fat cat bankers" on 60 Minutes last December."

there is more if you care to read it... but it sure doesn't look much like the market is scared of obama...

posted April 10, 2010 02:58 AM         

And I'm not surprised that they're doing better, having robbed us little people to bail them out instead of letting the free market replace them with more competent people...but then that's the purpose of government, to make sure the elites stay the elites and to protect them from competition, and it doesn't matter if it's capitalist or communist or (in the USA) Democrat or Republican. The differences are almost entirely cosmetic (ie, different reasons given for supporting the same things, and the followers dance to the tune played).

posted April 10, 2010 09:34 AM         

Get this straight.

The stock market...identified as the Dow Jones Industrial Average; an index of 30 major stocks representing a broad spectrum of US industrial companies...is down from a high of more than 14,000 back in late 2007.

As of Friday, the DJ-30 stands at 10,997.

That represents a loss of trillions of dollars in market value for investors, including pension funds; private, government and union pension funds.

The "market" is enjoying a brief run up in price due to an upswing in health care, health insurance and pharma stocks...which represent almost 16% of the private sector of the economy.

What else would you expect when O'Bomber has just commanded every American to purchase health insurance. That represents about 32,000,000 new customers commanded to purchase their product.

Imagine what will happen to Government Motors stock when O'Bomber commands every American to purchase a Chevrolet.

If I were looking for stock market/economic/financial advice, I sure as hell wouldn't listen to a word the morons at MSNBC have to say.

MSNBC is/was owned by NBC Universal which is/was owned by parent corporation, General Electric.

Both are doing so badly that GE agreed to sell NBC and MSNBC to Comcast late last year.

posted April 10, 2010 12:27 PM         

i didn't realize rupert murdoch owned GE thanks for that info!

i suppose it doesn't much matter that jobs are now being added to the economy instead of disappearing at the rate of hunreds of thousands a month like they were in 07 and 08, too...that ALSO might make reasonable people think this administration might NOT be run by the ANTICHRIST after all...imagine, people who would call a vote on a sunday, must be fiends!

i guess you are looking forward to the COMCAST NATION, eh jwhop? seen many independent films on tv lately?

posted April 10, 2010 02:27 PM         

You can take an automatic 50,000 jobs off the most recent 166,000 "jobs created" numbers. Those are temporary jobs for census takers.

What do you think is going to happen to those "jobs" numbers in June and July when the million of so temporarily hired government census takers lose their jobs?

posted April 10, 2010 03:00 PM         

More people are unemployed today than ever before. The actual rate of unemployment hovers at more than 16%.

O'Bomber's economic policies are killing the job market and there are no bright spots or lights at the end of the Socialist tunnel. We need about 125,000 jobs per month created in the private sector just to keep up with new entries into the job market. If we were doing that, it wouldn't reduce unemployment numbers at all. That's the break even point...but, we're already in a deep, dark Socialist hole.

posted April 10, 2010 05:51 PM         

I didn't want to change the ground rules in this conversation on how unemployment numbers are calculated.

If it were up to me, everyone who is unemployed and wants a job would be counted in the official tallies of the unemployed.