President Obama lost the mid-term election because jobs and incomes have stagnated (or worse) on his watch. It's true he inherited a mess, but he played a bad hand poorly. Paul Krugman has been focusing on the lack of government stimulus.
I think even more important is that Obama's economic team (and Democratic party financing?) was too beholden to Wall Street. In particular, the Democrats failed to tap into legitimate mainstream anger over the financial bail out. They let themselves be associated with elite finance, rather than articulate main street anger (which then got redirected toward nefarious ends). The system was propped up with cosmetic changes rather than reformed radicallly, and the folks that got the US (and the World) into a mess kept (much) of their ill gotten rewards; and with historically low interest rates financial institutions can make easy (risk free) money on the spread between the Fed rates and normal people's rates. Meanwhile, there is no reason to think that we won't experience more financial meltdowns in the not-so-distant future bank accounting standards have not been improved, financial tax arbitrage is still easy, and all over the world bankers' rewards are still private while the risks & costs are still shifted to the public.
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