United States Heading towards a Depression?

The simple fact is the present Administration curtailed the worst recession since the Great Depression caused by the Republican policies and principles of the previous Administration.

They have done so without inflation and with interest rate at historically low rates and have passed monumental legislation that will endure for generations to come.

The underlying cost of living and commodities of the above post are reflective of the recessions aftermath and the damage to the economy it has caused.

 

If it gets worse anytime in the near future, will you admit you were wrong ? If democrats actually fixed anything ( They just got through with another round of printing up 600 to 800 Billion dollars. ) it was their own pockets. People who refuse to look beyond veneer seldom see the cheapness of furniture.


Who is going to pay for those billions ?

 

No it isn't.

The simple fact is the present Administration encouraged the worst recession since the Great Depression made worse by the Democratic policies and principles of the present Administration.

 

There's but one difference between today and Carter's days. The fed has been able to control the interest rate. Without that, you'd have a much different outcome today.

The reality is breeze, the fed has been artificially manipulating both rates and the money supply for some time now. When that bubble bursts, inflation will be the least of our worries.

 

Speaking of controlling the interest rate :

LINK

"Bernanke keeping interest rates artificially low is sparking outrage among central bank chiefs around the world, who feel the U.S. is essentially exporting inflation."


Did anyone notice that the USA had a chilly reception at the G20 ?


Remember, China does not need to export to the USA anymore, they have already prepared to drop the USA by setting up exports to other countries.

 

As soon as people start spending, there will be too much money chasing too few goods and services.

The US simply doesn't produce enough and we live beyond our means.

47% of the US population lives off of government assistance.

Treasury yields jump, touching three-month highs

Treasurys took a beating Monday and interest rates rose to the highest levels in more than three months, after the government reported a surge in retail sales and the Federal Reserve's $600 billion bond-buying program came under attack.

The Fed bought $7.92 billion in Treasurys as part of that plan Monday. But the purchases failed to push prices up and lower yields. The yield on the 10-year note jumped to 2.95 percent. That's the highest level since late July, before the Fed began hinting it would take action to spur the economy.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Treasury-yields-jump-touching-apf-1643647461.html?x=0

 

We're already in a depression.

 

This thread has been around since December of 2007. I guess I will go ahead and agree ( again ) with the last poster... this is a depression.

 

According to some, that shows the success of socialism.

 

Nice Spin! Throw out false statements frequently enough and people start believing it. The fact of the matter is that the housing mess was caused by the Democrats. You need to review history back to the 1970s under President Jimmy Carter. During the Carter era, the foundations are the crisis was started by two policies (1) The Community Re-investment Act (2) Allowing banks to package mortgages into security instements. The Community Re-Investment Act basically forces banks to make home loans to people that can't afford it.

Carter and the Community Re-Investment Act were Phase I.

Phase II was under President Bill Clinton and Andrew Cuomo, the Housing and Urban Development secretary:

Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded "kickbacks" to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why.

http://nation.foxnews.com/andrew-cuomo/2010/09/23/paper-how-cuomo-gave-birth-housing-crisis

During Phase II, Barry Obama worked with Accorn as a community organizer. Obama actually sued the banks under the Community Re-investment Act.

Phase III was a Democratic feeding freenzy.

Fannie Mae and Freedie Mac poured campaign contributions into Obama, Hilary Clinton, Barney Frank, Pelosi, and Dodd.

Christopher Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committe recieved numerous sweetheart mortgages from the failed Countrywide Subprime lender under the "friends of Angelo program"

Barney Franks's husband was an executive at Fannie Mae at the time. Right there you have a conflict of interest having the Banking Chairman regulate his "boy toys"





According to a complaint later filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Freddie Mac, known formally as the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, misreported profits by billions of dollars in order to deceive investors between the years 2000 and 2002. Rahm Emanuel was on the board at the time and made millions. Emanuel was not named in the SEC complaint (click here to read) but the entire board was later accused by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO)

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=6201900&page=1



SO THE DEMOCRATS THAT MADE THE MESS ARE GOING TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM??? I call that letting the Fox guard the chicken coup.

The Housing mess is over. Schiller is estimating that prices will fall another 20%. The banks are repossesing 100k houses per month, which is an all time record. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae continue to lose approx $10 billion per quarter and losses are estimated to surpass $500 billion.

Most of the job numbers like first time claims and monthly job report are routinely revised downward later on are people forgot.

A depression is a series of events that happen over a period of time. During the Great Depression, there were a number of recessions within the depression.

 

As one of the two serious real-estate gurus in this thread, could you expand upon that for us amateurs?

 

Far be it for me to disagree, but I have to on this one. Printing more money sent an extra $10 out of my pocket to some arabs. Gas prices increased about 30 cents a gallon 5 minutes after the announcement that we were inking up the press again.

If my tank in one vehicle equated to $10 more as a result, multiply that by every tank in the US last week.

I fail to see how this stimulates the economy. It now costs me $10 more to fill up my tank than the week before? It now costs more than it did the week before to transport goods, services, food... So in the end, I am paying more for fuel that goes to my enemy who sends toner cartridges to the fed to print more money.

 

Let me take you guys back in time:
Secretary Cuomo admits they forced banks to make bad loans


[video=youtube;ivmL-lXNy64]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivmL-lXNy64&feature=player_embedded[/video]

Around the same time Time Magazine ran this cover:





Seems like someone wanted Americans to take out loans they wouldn't be able to pay back.

 

And the credit ratting agencies....merrily, merrily on their way.

Really, there is not a defined difference between a recession and a depression than a recession evolves into a depression when the duration becomes two years or longer or the severity of the statistics with a depression being the greater of the two.


Bogart: The 08-09 recession began at the end of the 2nd term of the Republican Administration and was caused by a multitude of factors not excluding as a primary factor the principals and policies of the Administration in power at the time.

It was not really the mortgage loans but the instruments they evolved into that caused the crisis and the lack of simple regulation and oversight that alone could have averted that aspect of the economic downturn.

The cost of the Iraqi war while reducing the ability for its funding was a risk the Bush Administration took and is responsible for in the final assessment of a 1.3 trillion dollar national debt.


At any rate all that is history with the convening of a new Congress that will begin a new chapter to the previous two years that remarkably stabilized the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression.

 

And there is no defined difference between your sentence structure and the definition of a run-on.

Agreed. The democrats were in charge during that period.

You're learning Breezy.

No, it was the loans. Bad loans don't evolve into anything. They're just bad loans.

Breeze, do you know the difference between debt and deficit?

Yes, again, you are correct. The new Congress will certainly be a new chapter in history. The previous two years made the two democratically controlled years prior look like an improvement.

 

And so now we enter the Greatest Depression ? Breeze, do you see what went on with Iceland, Greece, and now Ireland ?

 

Democrats took control of the US Senate in 2001 when Vermont Senator James Jeffords Defected to the Democrats.

Democrats prevented Bush overhaul of Fannie and Freddie back in 2003 (NY Times)

''The current regulator does not have the tools, or the mandate, to adequately regulate these enterprises,'' Mr. Oxley said at the hearing. ''We have seen in recent months that mismanagement and questionable accounting practices went largely unnoticed by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight,'' the independent agency that now regulates the companies.

''These irregularities, which have been going on for several years, should have been detected earlier by the regulator,'' he added.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpa...sec=&spon=&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Democrats stop McCain’s attempt to fix Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac in 2005

The Mcain Reform was killed in committee by Chris Dodd, then the ranking member of the Banking Committee and now its chair, at the same time he Dodd was receiving preferential loan treatment from Countrywide Mortgage, one of the companies gaming the system in the credit crisis.

http://hotair.com/archives/2008/09/17/mccains-attempt-to-fix-fannie-mae-freddie-mac-in-2005/

The US National Debt has increased 50% since Pelosi became Speaker of the House and increased 35% after two years of Obama,

Foreclosures Hit Record In September, More Than 100K Homes Seized

Lenders seized more U.S. homes summer 2010 than in any three-month stretch since the housing market began to bust in 2006.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/14/foreclosures-hit-record-t_n_762371.html

 

Big deal one person majority, they then lost 2 years latter.....
.........

What did pass and what did not pass during the Bush Administration is related to the degree both sides were willing to compromise and for the proper legislation to not have been produced can not be attributed to one side or the other any more than the initiative of the Bush Administration was insufficient to pursue legislation that would have benefited the country at the expense of their principals and philosophies that they were unwilling to compromise on is what history will chose in determining the proper legacy of that Administration.

Simply ignoring the 8 years of the Bush Administration who's culmination resulted in the recession either proves he was ineffectual and responsible by default or that the policies and principals of that Administration was the cause of the recession, as will be born out over time does not adequately equate the problem with the source when the preponderance for a recession is the outcome of the Executive branch of gov't.

 

Printing more money should cause the dollar to weaken. Either the comparison currencies weakened at the same time (statistically improbable), QE2 wasn't large enough or fast enough ($600B over 8 months) to weaken the dollar (more likely), or this is just a temporary blip (most likely).