3398

He is having a rally literally tonight in PA. I wonder if anyone told him to tune back the economy bragging?

3399
3400

Right… I wasn’t arguing to that extremes. Trump’s trade wars have already caused some precipitous drops in the Dow at times. Those are the disruptions (fuckups) to which I refer. If you’ll only accept examples where the entire market is completely tanked… That has never happened in our country. It has in others (Germany in 1914, Venezuela now, etc).

3401

My point is the presidents don’t really control the economy. So them taking credit or blame like they do is usually pretty ridiculous. They can influence it sure, but they simply do not have the power they claim they have or the way most people think they do.

3402

Trump’s policies have really been testing the economy’s resistance to inflationary pressures. That resistance is going to give way, and we will see much higher interest rates and inflation.

3403

Testing how. Trade Wars? Tax Cuts? This is not the first time for either of those. He doesn’t control the Fed. I mean, yeah if we’re going down the president can stomp his foot and try and push it down faster with doing dumb things. Congress can do that too but it… was already going down. You can say lack of regulation can lead to financial instability but they didn’t force the banks to make ninja loans. There were a lot of assumptions about how much a bank might not shoot itself in the foot but… the president did not tell them to do it.

3404

of course, he is such a giver

3405

It’s certainly possible for an individual to screw up an economy, but it’s rare that it happens. Winston Churchill almost destroyed the British economy after WWI. Maduro is largely responsible (with US help to be sure) for the destruction of the Venezuelan economy. Stalin fucked up the Soviet economy for generations and the Kims have ruined North Korea for about as long. But I’m not aware of any US President doing it, because the great depression as well as the recent one were both due to nonfeasance rather than active destructive effort.

3406

Yeah given the choice between adoration from a few hundred people and helping millions, he naturally chooses the adoration.

3407

Well I said President. I am not going to make claims about other countries and certainly not dictators or places where huge portions of the economy are actually in control of or owned by the national government either.

Ours is… well like I said, most presidents take too much credit and also too much blame.

3408

Heh. Also May and friends (and enemies) are about to cause grievous damage to the British economy, but that’s a party-wide effort.

3409

One could argue Hoover kind of did it, but generally their impact is limited at least in the short term.

I mean Clinton in many ways helped create the Great Recession, but we didn’t see those effects for quite a while. And it’s not like Congress didn’t help.

3410

Also:

I think you can put this directly in Trump’s lap. While most Presidents can’t claim the economy, he can because he’s directly fucking with it on a daily basis. It’s not like Clinton, Bush or Obama were in there tinkering with shit and starting trade wars (and trade wars will definitely have direct impact, which is why we stopped doing them).

3411

Testing as in running trillion-dollar deficits with low unemployment, while simultaneously engaging in trade wars. This is unprecedented.

3412

Re: The Great Depression’s effects on the US, didn’t the Smoot-Hawley tariff exacerbate things quite a bit?

3413

Yeah the government didn’t always help and has made things worst in the past but… not the cause of the downturn. I mean you can help smooth the downs and ups or you can make them worse and hurry them along, but there hundreds of other factors, like a lot of other things going on. The president’s policy is usually not the cause, just another influence to what is already going on.

But hey if you want to get Trump credit for the past few years and ready to lay it all on his feet when things go down faster than the Fed wants it to, go ahead. I won’t stop you. It’s just, he’s just a part, not even the biggest.

3414

There’s a pretty strong argument that Jimmy Carter’s appointment of Paul Volcker in 1979 led directly to the nasty double dip recessions of 1979 and 1981. Admittedly, the US economy was in a very screwy position at the time, and have gone off the rails regardless, but this Podcast with Rick Perlstein is pretty great (hat tip to @Triggercut).

3415

No doubt, but if the market was properly regulated it wouldn’t have crashed in the first place.

3416

Yeah, I was struck in that podcast about the inflationary statistics, and how real inflation essentially has been about at a 2% clip through a lot of the industrial age into the modern era…and then you get to the 1970s, and a variety of factors click into place and we have these three massive inflationary spikes within like a 8-year period of time…and those three things – combined with Carter’s decision to put Volcker on the Fed – have managed to shape how the modern Democratic Party conducts economic policy for the next 40 years.

The way Democrats have abandoned their New Deal mentality to be this austerity party is kind of equivalent to the way Republicans have abandoned their progressive, anti-slavery mentality to be the opposition party on civil rights and racial equality.

3417

Well sure, administration can make it worst. They can, for example, make a mild recession into a deeper one or even push it right into a depression… but it was going into a recession already and there were specific markets that were experiencing turmoil not due to the president signing something, like steel and oil. That recession was also pretty mild. Of course the old saying still holds true: what’s the difference between a recession and depression. In a recession you lose your job, in a depression I do. So mild always feels, relative.