President Obama defends his deficit spending and handling of the economic crisis in an interview with WAGA-TV, arguing that everybody – experts, economists, analysts and advisers – all underestimated the severity of the downturn:
“Well we’re not there because this recession turned out to be a lot deeper than any of us realized.”
“Everybody who is out there back in 2009, if you look back what their estimates were in terms of how many jobs had been lost, how bad the economy had contracted when I took office, everybody underestimated it. People thought that the economy contracted 3%. It turns it retracted close to 9%. We lost 8 million jobs just in a year’s span, about half a year before I took office and half a year after I took office,” Obama said.
“So, the die had been cast, but a lot of us didn’t understand at that point how bad it was going to get. That increases the deficit because less tax revenues come in, and it means that more people are getting unemployment insurance, we’re helping states more so they don’t layoff teachers, etc. The key though is we’re setting ourselves on a path where we can get our debt under control.”
Everybody in 2009 underestimated it.
Nobody could have possibly known.
Well, everybody except for these guys, who were warning Americans at exactly the time Mr. Obama says nobody realized how deep of a crisis this actually was:
Peter Schiff (Europac.net)- January 10, 2009:
Look, we have a serious serious problem and unfortunately the government is making it worse. The reason we’re in so much trouble is simply that we borrowed and spent too much money….We need to retrench. We need to reduce our spending and increase our savings. What Barack Obama’s trying to do is exactly the opposite. He’s trying to force-feed more borrowing and spending…What’s gonna happen now is that instead of allowing the free market to function, to rebalance this economy, the government is gonna force us deeper and deeper into debt…this is going to be an inflationary depression that is an exact consequence of the government.Gerald Celente (trendsresearch.com) – February 20, 2009
People are missing this for hopeful reasons, they’re dilluting themselves. A lot of people are losing a lot of money and they want to hope for the best. Other people are watching their coworkers get fired and are hoping that things will turn around. So you know, this whole mantra of hope has a powerful persuasive element to direct people in a false direction. People don’t want to face the facts… Here’s the scary thing: foreign countries are looking to the United States to solve the problem. They don’t realize how bad it is over here… People are one job away from losing everything. We’re going to see tax revolts over property taxes, school taxes and all of these hassle taxes that they are dumping on people... People are going to have to learn that if they want to survive these terrible times, to be more aware and take self defense measures in anticipation of the worst to come.Porter Stansberry (stansberryresearch.com) – September 9, 2008
Could this be it? Could this at long last be the beginning of the end of our fraudulent, insolvent, fractional reserve banking system? Fraud is everywhere in American finance, and it’s all rooted in the pervasive interference of government in our financial system. Not that anyone is saying this anywhere in the financial press. The consensus seems to be more interference is called for…Regulations and interference got us here. They won’t get us out.Jim Rogers – February 26, 2009
The US is going to have its worst economic times probably since the 1930′s… Now if everyone believes it’s going to be better in the second half of 2009 I promise you it’s not going to be. And it’s probably not going to be better in 2010, especially if that’s the consensus… The consensus has been totally dead wrong about this and continues to be dead wrong.Max Keiser (MaxKeiser.com)- January 18, 2009
It’s just currency that’s being fabricated. It’s fiat currency. What’s amazing is that people still accept the US dollar. I’m not sure if people have fully figured out yet that the American economy is completely bankrupt. If you’re accepting US dollars today or US Treasury bonds, the chance of getting paid back is not good.Marc Faber (GloomBoomDoom.com) – January 8, 2009
The whole world thinks that intervention – fiscal and monetary – is good. Nobody thinks clearly, what the consequences are…The market mechanism clears… the capitalistic system is designed [so] that the ones that are weak and incompetent are eliminated…I don’t think the economy can recover in the second half of 2009. I think we’ll have to wait a long time for a real economic recovery. I’m very bearish. I think it will take 5 years until the world recovers.David Morgan (silver-investor.com) – February 22, 2009
We are, in my view, in a long-term super cycle event that takes place every 200 or 300 years, and that’s a currency crisis. And in a currency crisis, it’s not really a function of whether we are in an inflation or deflation. It’s a function of whether the currency will be destroyed or not.Karl Denninger (market-ticker.org) – July 9, 2009
Here’s a reality check – consumer credit capacity has hit the wall. I noted this over a year ago, and started yelling about it. The shift of consumer spending to credit cards – the highest-interest means of financing payment – became apparent in the consumer credit report about that time. This marked the final desperate attempt to keep spending beyond our means by the average American sheeple, and it was doomed to failure….The answer is “no” to the question of “if you get laid off, can you find a new job.” Don’t listen to the fools – there is no “green shoot” in that report.John Williams (shadowstats.com) – January 23, 2009
The problem going forward is that the US Treasury is going to find it increasingly difficult to sell the Treasury securities that it needs in order to fund the government’s operations, to fund the bail out package, to fund the wars… One of two things happens… Either you get a very sharp rise in interest rates and a collapse in stock prices, or, the Federal Reserve becomes buyer of last resort for US Treasuries. And when the Federal Reserve becomes the buyer of US Treasuries it is monetization of debt.Bob Chapman ( theinternationalforecaster.com) – May 28, 2009
There is going to be massive inflation and what China should be doing is dumping dollars by buying gold. They have not anticipated the fall in US stock and bond markets and the derivative bomb. American assets, including bonds, will get badly trashed. We wrote of all this in June of 2002, but no one was listening… Today investors cannot conceive how bad this depression is going to get.Ron Paul – June 3, 2009
We cannot expect correct policies to be implemented if we don’t understand the cause of the crisis… We have failed to recognize the true cause of the crisis. Instead, free markets and not enough regulations and central economic planning have been blamed... There is an attitude that the deficit and inflation can be dealt with later on. Yet tomorrow will be here sooner than later… Pretending that politicians, central bankers and regulators have the knowledge to centrally plan the economy and police the world only makes things worse.
Mr. Obama’s suggests in his recent interview that, though he, his advisers and industry experts didn’t realize how bad it was going to get, they have it all figured out now.
If there’s one thing we should have learned from ‘everybody’ in the last few years it’s that we should fear the experts and their consensus opinion, because there’s a strong likelihood that ‘everybody’ is underestimating ‘it’ yet again.
Moreover, they are overestimating their ability to mitigate this crisis with the same policies – those of government intervention and expanded central planning, easy money, crony capitalism, taxation and wealth redistribution – that got us here in the first place.
Unfortunately for the American people, the experts still haven’t realized how bad it really is.