THE TELEGRAPH: The President has dithered over the banks and the economy in his first 100 days in power, says Edmund Conway.
Barack Obama is a pretty superstitious guy. During the marathon presidential campaign, he made a routine of playing basketball on each of the various polling days, and carried with him a pocketful of lucky trinkets, including a poker chip and a small golden statue of the Monkey King. So one rather fears for his reaction to the inauspicious omens yesterday, on his 100th day in office.
As if the first US death from swine flu weren’t bad enough, the President had to contend with news that the economy slumped by an annual rate of 6.1 per cent in the first three months of the year – far more than most experts were expecting. Jeff Frankel, a leading institutional economist, declared that this is now the longest and sharpest slump since the Great Depression.
The banking system is still in crisis, house prices are in freefall and unemployment is climbing rapidly; those seeking out green shoots are likely to be disappointed, since the economy is hardly through the danger zone. The only consolation comes from the stock market, which is more or less flat since Obama took over, and the fact that most other economies are in a worse state. More worryingly, the new president has yet to convince us that he is more Franklin D Roosevelt than Herbert Hoover. Those of us who hoped that the new president would infuse genuine urgency into the rescue plan, for either the economy or the financial system, have been sorely disappointed. The language may be more sincere, the speeches more glamorous, but the response is still nowhere near bold enough. All the criticisms of the initial Bush “rescue” – that it nationalised the financial system’s losses while allowing the bankers to make off with the profits; that it failed to draw a line under the institutions’ previous failures – remain applicable to Obama’s scheme. >>> By Edmund Conway | Wednesday, April 29, 2009
