DHuffman's blog

 http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-07-15/how-obama-lost-small-business/?cid=bs:archive7

For those of you who do not know me, I work at a small business, and meet with small business owners every week during the course of my work.  This article rings true even in a progressive area such as Cook County.

"The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn't a typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment.

George Soros recently gave a speech at a conference in Vienna.  The link below is a transcript of that speech.  There are two main sections of this transcript that should be broken down.  The first six paragraphs provide a succinct, clean, and accurate assessment of where I believe our economy is today.  The second section of this speech is the opinion of Mr. Soros about wide ranging economic theory.  

 There has been an ever growing chorus of protest over the past 24-months about government bailouts to the financial industry (bailouts of GM, the GSE's, and others are even worse, though outside the scope of this analysis).  American citizens across the country have been attacking the use of their tax dollars to socialize private losses of the big banks, all in the name of stabilizing the financial system to avoid a larger catastrophe.

In a recent New York Times editorial, Mr. Krugman noted that "I don't think many people grasp just how much job creation we need to climb out of the hole we're in. You can't just look at the eight million jobs that America has lost since the recession began, because the nation needs to keep adding jobs - more than 100,000 a month - to keep up with a growing population. And that means that we need really big job gains, month after month, if we want to see America return to anything that feels like full employment. How big?