Financial Recessions Don’t Lead to Weak Recoveries
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on September 29th, 2012 11:08 pm by HL
Financial Recessions Don’t Lead to Weak Recoveries
Michael Bordo, WSJ
There's a belief among policy makers that serious recessions associated with financial crises are necessarily followed by slow recoveries"”like the one we've experienced since mid-2009. But this widespread belief is mistaken. To the contrary, U.S. business cycles going back more than a century show that deep recessions accompanied by financial crises are almost always followed by rapid recoveries.The mistaken view comes largely from the 2009 book “This Time Is Different,” by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, and other studies based on the…
Mitt Romney’s Long, Dark Night
Charles Blow, New York Times
Not only is he trailing President Obama in almost every national poll, he's trailing in almost every poll of swing states.What is the Republican response? That there must be some magical, maniacal skew in the numbers, and the skew must be a conscious effort by a scheming, elite media to dampen Republican enthusiasm.
Voters Aren’t Buying Mitt Romney
Joan Walsh, Salon
I know, “the dogs won’t eat the dog food” is kind of a cliché, but maybe because of Mitt Romney’s Seamus I couldn’t resist it. It refers to attempts to blame marketing for a product not selling, when the problem is the product itself. Romney is the product the voters aren’t buying – the dog food, if you will.Journalists and political operatives are already engaged in a pre-mortem about Romney’s awful campaign, and what killed it: The never-ending tax controversy? Bain job-killing? His Olympics stumble?…
Akin Calls GOP’s Bluff, But Can He Win?
Scott Conroy, RealClearPolitics
Trapped in the depths of political purgatory last month following his ill-advised comments about “legitimate rape,” Rep. Todd Akin was deluged daily with pleas from fellow Republicans that he exit the Missouri race for U.S. Senate.His comments were so egregiously off-base, they insisted, that his hopes of defeating incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill had shifted from nearly guaranteed to utterly hopeless.Akin shrugged it all off, even ignoring Karl Rove's jesting homicidal threat made during a private meeting with GOP donors.The Show Me State congressman stubbornly insisted…
Why GOP Billionaires Aren’t Winning
Jonathan Alter, Bloomberg
A funny thing's happening on the way to Nov. 6. The billionaires trying to buy the U.S. election with contributions of $1 million, $10 million or even $100 million aren't succeeding.If trends continue and the Democrats have a good year (still a big if), the notion that in order to win candidates need the indirect backing provided by gobs of money from super-political action committees will be discredited.