DOW increases 3% on better than expected tensions.
Bitter disagreements have broken out in the team over whether the Obama economy is merely awesome or tha shiznit!
There may be at least one adult in the administration who realizes that continuing this ridiculous spending spree is going to put the brakes on the economy bigtime. The ideas being floated about more taxes to pay for health care are ridiculous. You don’t raise taxes in a recession. It’s idiotic.
Bernanke testified last week that we had to rein in government spending. He’s scared of a bond dislocation as there have been numerous articles about bond vigilantes refusing to play the game anymore. The Chinese have threatened as well and Hillary AND Turbo Timmy had to go over there and twist their arms.
The rise in treasury rates just recently have torpedoed a lot of mortgage refi’s in the pipeline and stifled potential sales. If we have another 1-2% rise in loan rates, forget about a housing market recovery. It will just keep plummeting.
A steady recovery is contingent not only on keeping interest rates low, but also on reining in federal spending. They have to be in tandem or else the latter prevents the former.
Is Paul Volcker still around or has he been completely marginalized? He would not like what’s going on at all and would provide adult supervision.
We’ll know more about where this story is coming from and what the purpose of it is soon. Headline is too sketchy right now to draw conclusions.
This might have something to do with the tension:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2266785/posts
Anyone remember the late 90’s on FR, before the blogisphere, when a Drudge headline would keep a thread going for hours? Those were the days....
The “Not-Ready-For-Primetime” economic team, that is...
The stimulus isn’t working, is it, folks?
LOL! Panicking fools! It’s something THEY can’t fix!
What???? No joy in Muckville? Obama is striking out? How can this happen? We were promised that the Messiah had all the answers to lead us into the land of economic milk and honey, nectar and manna. Instead it looks more and more like cod liver oil.
Where's that Freeper that posts the picture of "Captain Obvious" when we need him?
Leni
They’re running out of other peoples’ money.
President’s Economic Circle Keeps Tensions at a Simmer
WASHINGTON — President Obama was getting his daily economic briefing one recent morning when a fly distracted him. The president swatted and missed, just as the pest buzzed near the shoes of Lawrence H. Summers, the chief White House economic adviser. “Couldn’t you aim a little higher?” deadpanned Christina D. Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
Mrs. Romer was joking, she said in an interview, adding, “There are only a few times that I felt like smacking Larry.” Yet few laughed in the president’s presence.
If the Oval Office incident was meant as a lighthearted moment, it also exposed the underlying tensions that have gripped Mr. Obama’s economic advisers as they have struggled with the gravest financial crisis since the Depression, according to several dozen interviews with administration officials and others familiar with the internal debates.
By all accounts, much of the tension derives from the president’s choice of the brilliant but sometimes supercilious Mr. Summers to be the director of the National Economic Council, making him the policy impresario of the team. The widespread assumption, from Washington to Wall Street, was that the job would be Mr. Summers’s way station until the president could name him chairman of the Federal Reserve when Ben S. Bernanke’s term expires early next year.
But Mr. Bernanke’s aggressive response to the crisis has so improved his reputation that people close to Mr. Obama increasingly suggest the president could well reappoint him in the interests of financial stability — just as Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton retained Fed chiefs who had been picked by predecessors of the other party.
As for Mr. Summers, even as top administration officials acknowledge the occasional strains among economic advisers, they say the president is thrilled with the job Mr. Summers is doing in his current post.
When Mr. Obama named his economic team last November, even some within his circle questioned whether Mr. Summers, given his prickly personality, could be an honest broker of other advisers’ ideas, as National Economic Council directors are supposed to be. Mr. Summers also had made it clear that he wanted to be Treasury secretary again, as he was in the Clinton administration.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/08/us/politics/08team.html?ref=business
They have no idea what they are doing.....WASS
bttt