{"id":183,"date":"2011-06-03T10:54:18","date_gmt":"2011-06-03T14:54:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.borg.org\/?p=183"},"modified":"2011-06-03T10:54:18","modified_gmt":"2011-06-03T14:54:18","slug":"bitching-about-the-obama-economy-is-like-telling-captain-sully-the-hudson-was-the-wrong-destination-and-why-am-i-all-wet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/?p=183","title":{"rendered":"Bitching about the Obama economy is like telling Captain Sully: &quot;The Hudson was the wrong destination! And why am I all wet!?&quot;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Our economy nearly died, and you are griping about it being too sluggish?<\/p>\n<p>We almost had to rename the Great Depression!<\/p>\n<p>World War One got renamed.\u00a0 It started out as The Great War, the &#8220;war to end all wars&#8221;.\u00a0 But a few years later we had an even bigger war, and we had to rename it.\u00a0 It became &#8220;World War One&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Well, we almost had to rename the &#8220;Great Depression&#8221; to the &#8220;First Great Depression&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>It was that bad.\u00a0 Instead we only call it the &#8220;Great Recession&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Consider:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The port of LA\/Long Beach.\u00a0 It is the busiest port in the US, and it came to a near halt.\u00a0 Cars that were already on ships when the crash hit arrived, but had no place to go when dealerships couldn&#8217;t afford them, they accumulated. One of our biggest exports through that port also stopped: cardboard.\u00a0 Recycling was a problem when it backed up. (Did you know that recycled cardboard is a significant export from the US to China? They ship us TVs and we ship them the empty boxes.)\u00a0 Normally there have terrible air pollution there, with all the trucks moving freight back and forth, in and out.\u00a0 But the port mostly stopped.\u00a0 The air cleared.\u00a0 Prices to ship goods (such as Baltic Dry Index) plunged because nothing was moving.<\/li>\n<li>The &#8220;TED Spread&#8221; shot up to scary levels.\u00a0 That is, the difference between the interest the US government must pay to borrow money and what big banks charge each other. Normally, big banks get almost as good a deal as does the USA and the TED spread is well under a half percent. But in 2008 it shot up to over 4.5%.\u00a0 Banks were unwilling to lend each other money at a good rate because they knew the others were at risk of going out of business.<\/li>\n<li>The &#8220;commercial paper market&#8221; stopped.\u00a0 Much of the economy runs by big companies borrowing and lending money back and forth, for short periods of time, at low interest rates.\u00a0 That all stopped.\u00a0 You might remember GE (normally an extremely good credit risk) had to get a big loan from Warren Buffet because it couldn&#8217;t borrow money anywhere else.\u00a0 If GE can&#8217;t borrow money, the economy is badly broken.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That has all changed.\u00a0 All the &#8220;bailouts&#8221; that people complain about saved our sorry butts.\u00a0 Heck, the US auto industry is making a profit now.\u00a0 The maligned TARP program even <em>made<\/em> money for the US government!\u00a0 That&#8217;s right, TARP was profitable.<\/p>\n<p>No one bitched that Sully didn&#8217;t get them there on time, so quit bitching that the recovery from this recession is too slow.<\/p>\n<p>Our economy almost lost it.\u00a0 We are damn lucky we aren&#8217;t in breadlines still in 2011.\u00a0 Instead, our economy is growing.\u00a0 Painfully slowly, but it is growing.\u00a0 Be grateful.<\/p>\n<p>-kb, the Kent who is glad he has a job when so many do not.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a92011 Kent Borg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our economy nearly died, and you are griping about it being too sluggish? We almost had to rename the Great Depression! World War One got renamed.\u00a0 It started out as The Great War, the &#8220;war to end all wars&#8221;.\u00a0 But a few years later we had an even bigger war, and we had to rename [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[33,34,50,68,133,134,300,302,336],"class_list":["post-183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-bailouts","tag-baltic-dry-index","tag-captain-sully","tag-commercial-paper","tag-great-depression","tag-great-recession","tag-tarp","tag-ted-spread","tag-world-war-one"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}