Topic: How much control does the President truly have over the economy? - page 2. (Read 4467 times)

you cant blame only the president for this mess, you have to blame the whole government from this mess, since the time they started taking loans from banks and printing more money, and these caused the USA to lose there rating from owing not only banks but other countries as well.

Must watch:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1232207/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=232qaFGyzwQ

Deregulation happened during Clinton administration

The big crash of 2008 could have been avoided at the cost of a smaller crash about two years earlier. Without some of the Bush-era stimulus policies, there would have been a crash in housing several years earlier, but it would have been about the size of the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s. There was a mindset, fully endorsed by Alan Greenspan at the Fed, that rising house prices were a good thing and a source of wealth. Greenspan really didn't believe that someday there had to be a crash in housing. ("Houses can only go up!". Wrong.)

A big problem was the earlier elimination of Glass-Stegall, the law which kept commercial banks from getting into the stock market. While brokerages were separate from banking, a Wall Street crash didn't take down the banking system. That separation was put into place in 1933 because of the 1929 crash. It was repealed in 1999. Trouble soon followed.

Here's the thing, politics is like WWE wrestling. They pretend to hate each other and focus on all their differences, but behind closed doors, they are all buddies, playing golf and smoking cigars together.

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OP asked:

"How much control does the President truly have over the economy?"

OROBTC responds:

It depends.  .gov or the President can mess up the economy very quickly with bad decisions, but to build the economy back up takes time and determination.  The populist (= pandering) solutions usually work out poorly... 

Free enterprise / Liberty / Capitalism have a bad popular taint to them now as concepts, but that is how America became great.  Now we have filthy banksters and corrupt politicians who have hijacked the USA.

"Our debts and our sins are greater than we think."
-- Wm Shakespeare

Absolutely! One of the parties pretends to be pro gay rights.

Voting has no effect on the continuous march of one world government/collectivism. If it did it'd be banned.

There are independent candidates, even if they haven't a chance to win.
Anyway, I see some differences between republicans and democrats.

If you vote against the current president, you still have to vote for the other candidate, who will end up doing the exact same thing. 

The fed isn't part of the US government. They merely wield the authority that congress granted them. So now we pay interest on currency we could print debt free.

A president could have a great deal of influence over the economy. He could do what Kennedy did and return the power to print debt free currency to the treasury where it belongs and short circuit the fed. Then he could decide NOT to drive around dallas in a convertible.

They do care for the Economy. All studies show that people vote taking in account their pockets. If they are empty, they vote against the president.

On a scale of 1-10, how much do you think the president actually even wholeheartedly cares about the economy vs. just wanting to make sure that everyone is paying taxes?

I just added Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy to my "must read" list. It appears to contain a great deal of wisdom about political power.

The President has some control of the financial/budget policy (with the Congress), but almost none on the monetary policy. The FED made much more for the recovery of the Economy than the President. Just see the mess in which Europe is. The only difference is the conservative monetary policy of the ECB (only now, to late, starting to change).

From the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:

He personally doesn't have that mich power, it is the people behind him in the shadows that pull the strings. The Federal Reserve obviously has major power over the country and basically owns it.

Ok.  I agree that free market does not imply the freedom to commit fraud.

I don't include "fraud" in my definition of "fractional reserve banking"; I see it instead as a form of gambling.

president can write or influence laws that can effect the economy

Not as much as people blame/praise them for it. Certainly less than what the current president falsely promised he can do - or clearly on purpose implied he could do. "Let me be clear..."

But by liberal logic, bush was in complete control of the housing markets and obama is only being 'obstructed' by......everything else that is not their cup of tea.

I think your education can clearly tell you which conclusion is the more logical one. Just as you may not blame the current lack of significant progress fully on the empty suit, you cannot fully place blame on the previous downturn as brainchild of bush jr. Economics have a life of their own.

We are even now relatively a free market society. People who are just waking up to the intricacies of the weave between politics, money, and influence based institutions have no right to screech and wail that present system in US is something they can criticize - in other nations they are taken for granted that it is that corrupt.

President has small slice of the pie in terms of economic influence. His sphere of influence is mainly centered around soft influence in domestic matters + executive power of the state to command the armed forces and intelligence organs who can deliver the pain to those who need killing. Any further influence on economic spheres of influence can be considered 'extracurricular'.

Now if you were to discuss IF those 'extracurriculars' are actually like so in these times, that's another matter all together. But certainly in US president's main sphere of influence lies in areas of political and military control.

Yes, i am.
fractional reserve banking is a form of fraud.
the fact that the market should be free does not mean that there is no rule of law to prevent fraud.
if a bank wants to loan a client's money it needs to ask the client to loan it to the bank first.