Kristol Issues Another Correction: I Was Wrong To Blame Obama For Stock Market Declines
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/05/10/kristol-stock-market/In discussing the state of the economy this morning on Fox News Sunday, conservative commentator Bill Kristol noted that the stock market has performed reasonably well over the last several months. “The market’s up 35 percent in the last two months, which is pretty amazing,” Kristol said. He then noted that those Republicans — including himself — who were “chortling” about the stock market’s significant decline just after President Obama’s inauguration would now be forced to admit that they were wrong:
Republicans who were chortling over that 20 percent drop in the stock market the first month or two of administration are going to be, fairly enough, hoist on our own petard by the fact that now Obama’s getting this big stock market rally. … I — no one should base anything on this forecast — but in my view the short term is surprisingly bullish, but medium-long term very worrisome.
In it, Kristol argued that Obama’s failure to base his entire economic agenda on ensuring day-to-day gains in the markets on Wall Street demonstrated he had already failed at governing:
So the stock market drops over 25 percent since Election Day, almost 20 percent since Inauguration — and Barack Obama tells the American people at his press conference Tuesday not to “spend all your time worrying about that.” <...>
The stock market is about real money, about the real livelihoods of real. … I’m told almost every theme in Obama’s speech last Tuesday night was focus-group tested–and the speech played pretty well politically. But the markets weren’t impressed.
Isn’t it time for Obama and his team to get up the nerve to stop playing politics and to govern?Larry Lindsey -"who has been a good forecaster over the last 10 or 15 years or so in my opinion" (Kristol) got fired after offering a sober anticipation of the costs of the war in Iraq
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lindsey#The_Iraq_controversyThe Iraq controversy
On September 15, 2002, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Lindsey estimated the high limit on the cost of the Bush administration's plan in 2002 of invasion and regime change in Iraq to be 1-2% of GNP, or about $100-$200 billion.<1> Mitch Daniels, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, subsequently discounted this estimate as "very, very high" and stated that the costs would be between $50-$60 billion.<2> This lower figure was endorsed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld<2> who called Lindsey's estimate "baloney".<3>
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