Obama’s Big, Bold Bet
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT
While campaigning for the presidency in 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt gave a commencement address on May 22 at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta that probably describes President Obama’s strategy today — and the big bet he has made — as well as anything could.
“The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation,” said Roosevelt. “It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
When you total up all the emergency economic policies that Mr. Obama has now put in place — a nearly $800 billion stimulus, mortgage relief, a private-public program for buying up toxic assets and a huge capital injection into the banking system by the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates and expand credit — they constitute one big experiment.
Together, these policies — call them Obama Rescue Phase I — represent a huge bet that the administration can confine this economic crisis to a really nasty recession, the sort of thing that might constitute a long chapter in an economic history and not a 21st-century Depression that would trigger a whole bookshelf on the theme of: “How Barack Obama Won an Election and Lost an Economy.”
(More here.)
NYT
While campaigning for the presidency in 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt gave a commencement address on May 22 at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta that probably describes President Obama’s strategy today — and the big bet he has made — as well as anything could.
“The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation,” said Roosevelt. “It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
When you total up all the emergency economic policies that Mr. Obama has now put in place — a nearly $800 billion stimulus, mortgage relief, a private-public program for buying up toxic assets and a huge capital injection into the banking system by the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates and expand credit — they constitute one big experiment.
Together, these policies — call them Obama Rescue Phase I — represent a huge bet that the administration can confine this economic crisis to a really nasty recession, the sort of thing that might constitute a long chapter in an economic history and not a 21st-century Depression that would trigger a whole bookshelf on the theme of: “How Barack Obama Won an Election and Lost an Economy.”
(More here.)
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