
Our country has been in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. There were several reasons for the near total collapse of our economy.
Causes included the deregulation of the banking industry, deregulation of commodities markets, ridiculously low interest rates, easy credit with little or no background checks, lack of oversight by the SEC, Bush touting an “ownership society,” tax cuts for the wealthy, huge deficits and the doubling of the U.S. debt, and huge bonuses and salaries for CEOs who boosted company stock prices.
The effect was high stakes gambling on the part of the finance sector by over-leveraging, the housing bubble, record high gas prices, ponzi-schemes masquerading as investments, ubiquitous subprime lending, CEOs who’s only concern was driving up company stock prices so they could get their bonuses…
We’ve also had a flood of manufacturing jobs out of our country and to countries, mainly China, where workers would work for slave wages.
And the end result was the near total collapse of our economy.
While the Bush administration shoulders a good part of the blame, the problem began building long before he took office. The repeal of the Glass-Stegall act occured during the Clinton administration as well as the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Reagan’s deregulation resulted in the S&L scandal and bailout.
Free market economics and deregulation are at the core of conservative economic ideology. So what has Obama done to correct the conservative policies that caused the meltdown of our economy? Very little.