Truth About the Economy
From Bloomberg, not the most liberal source of economic news on earth:
"The political consensus may be that President Barack Obama's handling of the economy has been weak. The judgment of money in all its forms has been overwhelmingly positive, and that may be the more lasting appraisal.
We’ve had a phenomenal run in asset classes across the board,” said Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist for Miller Tabak & Co. in New York. “If he was a Republican, we would hear a never-ending drumbeat of news stories about markets voting in favor of the president.”
The economy has also strengthened beyond expectations at the time Obama took office. The gross domestic product grew at a 5.9 percent annual pace in the fourth quarter, compared with a median forecast of 2.0 percent in a Bloomberg survey of economists a week before Obama’s Jan. 20, 2009, inauguration. The median forecast for GDP growth this year is 3.0 percent, according to Bloomberg’s February survey of economists, versus 2.1 percent for 2010 in the survey taken 13 months earlier.
“You have to give them -- along with the Federal Reserve - - a lot of credit,” said Joseph Carson, director of economic research at AllianceBernstein LP in New York. “A year ago, there was panic, as well as concern. And a lot of the expectations were not only that we were going to have declines in activity but they would stretch all the way to 2010, if not 2011.”
Since then, monthly job losses have abated, from 779,000 during the month Obama took office to 36,000 last month. Corporate profits have grown; among 491 companies in the S&P 500 that reported fourth-quarter earnings, profits rose 180 percent from a year ago, according to Bloomberg data. Durable goods orders in January were up 9.3 percent from a year earlier. Inflation is tame, and long-term interest rates remain low.
Housing prices, which dropped since 2007 and proved a drag on the economy, have firmed. The median sales price for existing homes in January was the same as a year earlier.
International currency markets are bullish on the dollar, which has rallied more than 8 percent since Nov. 25, according to the Intercontinental Exchange’s Dollar Index. And commodity prices are up more than 32 percent since Obama took office, according to the UBS Bloomberg Commodity Index."
And yet, the national news media collaborate with the Republican party in convincing the American people that Obama is destroying the economy. This is to enable the Republicans to take back control of Washington and send our country into another tailspin. No amount of damage to the rest of us is enough to stop their plans to further plunder every dollar in the land.
And it's working. The Republicans and the press between them have managed to hide all of this good news and convince most Americans that Obama is failing to fix the mess they left him.
"The political consensus may be that President Barack Obama's handling of the economy has been weak. The judgment of money in all its forms has been overwhelmingly positive, and that may be the more lasting appraisal.
We’ve had a phenomenal run in asset classes across the board,” said Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist for Miller Tabak & Co. in New York. “If he was a Republican, we would hear a never-ending drumbeat of news stories about markets voting in favor of the president.”
The economy has also strengthened beyond expectations at the time Obama took office. The gross domestic product grew at a 5.9 percent annual pace in the fourth quarter, compared with a median forecast of 2.0 percent in a Bloomberg survey of economists a week before Obama’s Jan. 20, 2009, inauguration. The median forecast for GDP growth this year is 3.0 percent, according to Bloomberg’s February survey of economists, versus 2.1 percent for 2010 in the survey taken 13 months earlier.
“You have to give them -- along with the Federal Reserve - - a lot of credit,” said Joseph Carson, director of economic research at AllianceBernstein LP in New York. “A year ago, there was panic, as well as concern. And a lot of the expectations were not only that we were going to have declines in activity but they would stretch all the way to 2010, if not 2011.”
Since then, monthly job losses have abated, from 779,000 during the month Obama took office to 36,000 last month. Corporate profits have grown; among 491 companies in the S&P 500 that reported fourth-quarter earnings, profits rose 180 percent from a year ago, according to Bloomberg data. Durable goods orders in January were up 9.3 percent from a year earlier. Inflation is tame, and long-term interest rates remain low.
Housing prices, which dropped since 2007 and proved a drag on the economy, have firmed. The median sales price for existing homes in January was the same as a year earlier.
International currency markets are bullish on the dollar, which has rallied more than 8 percent since Nov. 25, according to the Intercontinental Exchange’s Dollar Index. And commodity prices are up more than 32 percent since Obama took office, according to the UBS Bloomberg Commodity Index."
And yet, the national news media collaborate with the Republican party in convincing the American people that Obama is destroying the economy. This is to enable the Republicans to take back control of Washington and send our country into another tailspin. No amount of damage to the rest of us is enough to stop their plans to further plunder every dollar in the land.
And it's working. The Republicans and the press between them have managed to hide all of this good news and convince most Americans that Obama is failing to fix the mess they left him.
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