0:50 “by 2007 neglected making criticial investments & middle class squeezed like never before”

This is blah blah smokescreen talk. What really happened 2003-2007 was a massive credit cycle as housing prices appreciated in response to lower taxes and lower interest rates, and speculation with suicide loans.

In addition to the housing bubble driving home values up and feeding the banking, construction and real estate sectors with business, this fed both upon itself and into the wider economy via cash-out refinances and HELOC borrowing.

The economic effect of this was well over $100B/mo, or around 10 million jobs.

So when the Bush boom ended, we lose 2M construction jobs:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USCONS?cid=11

and 9M total jobs (chart)

leaving the economy back to where it was before we started the debt bubble.

And to understand the debt bubble you have to see this chart:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CMDEBT

which explains everything IMO.

“catastrophic job losses” lose 4M jobs six months prior to Jan/2009.

Thing is, like I said before, jobs wouldn’t collapse to zero. We’d come into a soft landing eventually.

(part II)

“job creating investment to keep the job market improving”

This really remains to be seen. What we need to do is weaken the dollar so we can move more manufacturing jobs back home:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USGOOD?cid=11

Goods manufacturing employment is down to 1960s levels!

While government jobs:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USGOVT?cid=11

have grown, since 2001 we’ve just been borrowing the money to pay for this growth:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FYGFDPUN

Retail jobs are back to 1990s too:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USTRADE?cid=11

Living in Japan for the bubble time, you should recognize what happened. A lot of borrowed money was churning through the economy 2003-2007, but the party stopped in early 2008 and now we’ve got to pay for those good times, just like Japan has been paying for their 1980s party, 1991-now.

It is true that transfer payments to the states kept employment from crashing more, but this is only a temporary bandaid, almost like Weimar Germany printing money to pay the bills.

This presentation looks good, but it’s not the truth.

Troy, you lost me at “Bush boom”. The “Bush boom” was gutless to begin with… a jobless recovery, based on speculation and outsourcing company earnings.

Yes, the presentation looks good. It’s certainly stretching things to credit Obama and his policies alone with the recovery, I’m sure a lot was dumb luck and business cycles… as well as confidence in leadership… but it sure beats letting the typical drum beat of “Obamacare” and “Obama’s wars” and “Obama’s recession” win the day. …it may not be completely true to credit Obama for most of what we see (of course)… but it is also reasonable to say that his policies are putting us in the right direction – and that a continuation of Bush’s policies would have put us in a much worse place than we are now.

The other day I commented about the other white board presentation about GM on another website… as far as presentation, I think its not too far of a reach to say that its this generations version of the fire-side chat. Obama tries to do the fire-side chat in his weekly addresses… but I don’t imagine that the reach of those has ever been outside of his supporters… this venue, on the other hand, has a chance to resonate… in this modern world – not of chats by the fire, but of corporate presentations by managers at a white board – no nonsense, high energy, brief, focused… business-like.