Free Republic

Now that 6 months have passed since Obama's "stimulus plan" has passed, I thought it useful to examine the stock market reaction to Obama's plan and compare it to the reaction of President Bush's 2003 stimulus plan. Bush's plan passed in April 2003 while Obama's passed in February 2009. I chose the S&P 500 Index starting point one month prior to passage because the market typically discounts the information beforehand as the bills work their way through Congress. I chose 6 months-post passage as the ending point because that's all the data we have for Obama's plan so far. Bush:...

Tim Geithner played the key role in his position at the IMF during the Asian crisis of 1997-98. Paul Keating, then Australia's Prime Minister, recently said that Geithner's "solution" to the crisis was dead wrong and devastated many Asian economies, in particular Indonesia. "Tim Geithner was the Treasury line officer who wrote the IMF [International Monetary Fund] program for Indonesia in 1997-98, which was to apply current account solutions to a capital account crisis." In other words, Geithner fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. And his misdiagnosis led to a dreadfully wrong prescription...

A key element to Obama's magical utopia is to force banks (or allow judges on their behalf, but that is a very sketchy idea even to Obama) to rewrite mortgages so that everyone can continue to have a home. It obviously makes no difference whether or not people can afford it because, according to Washington, home ownership is now a right as important as that of free speech (assuming you're not a leading radio talk show host). Obama rightfully understands that the easiest way to do this is to either persuade banks or to force them. Since banks are private...

John McCain says he does not listen to Rush Limbaugh and does not expect his endorsement. But here is McCain's quote of the day that probably won't endear him to many conservatives: "I don't listen to him [Rush] very much. There's a certain trace of masochism in my family, but not that deep."