"Romney’s allusions to Carter don’t fit" by John Detrixhe and Rich Miller | Bloomberg News, July 07, 2012
WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney has suggested that President Obama has done a worse job managing the economy than Jimmy Carter. Investors disagree.
I'll bet they do.
"Corporate profits have risen 58 percent since mid-2009" and "corporate profits set a post World War II record last year" while big banks are booming and oil companies are awash in profits.
I'm sure that's better than under Carter.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index of stock prices has surged 70 percent under Obama, more than three times the 19 percent increase seen during President Carter’s first 3½ years in office starting in 1977. The corporate and government bond markets also have outperformed. And the dollar has fared better, dropping about 4 percent against major currencies since Obama took over, compared with an almost 20 percent decline under Carter at a similar time in his tenure.
‘‘We were seen as the weak sister back then,’’ as the United States struggled to free hostages seized by Iran from the American embassy in Tehran, said David Jones, 74, chief executive of DMJ Advisors in Denver. ‘‘Now we’re the safe haven.’’
Carter was swept out of office in 1980 by Ronald Reagan, who outpolled the Democrat by an almost 10-point margin. By comparing Obama to Carter, Romney is seeking to replicate Reagan’s success in painting his opponent as a failure on the economy. Obama leads Romney 48 percent to 44 percent in the Gallup tracking poll conducted June 27 through July 3.
Related: Romney Romances the Ladies
It's over for Obama.
At a campaign stop in Chantilly, Va., on May 2, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee accused Obama of running an administration that has been the most antithetical to small business since Carter’s.
‘‘Who would guess that we’d look back on the Carter years as the good old days?’’ asked Romney.
Me.
They were anything but.
Well....
The misery index, which combines the unemployment and inflation rates, stood at 20.3 percent as voters went to the polls in November 1980, just below the post-World War II high of 22 percent set in June of that year.
Foreign confidence in the United States was so low Carter had to issue US government bonds denominated in German marks and Swiss francs in 1978 to entice investors overseas to buy them. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note stood at 12.4 percent at the end of 1980, up from 7.26 percent when Carter took office.
‘‘The ‘70s were far worse than what we are experiencing,’’ Laurence Fink, chief executive of BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, said. ‘‘We had double-digit inflation and you had high unemployment.’’
???
We were told the last economic crisis was the worst since the Depression?
And the 70's may have been bad; however, the JOB MARKET was in a HELL OF A LOT BETTER SHAPE BACK THEN!
While Obama has acknowledged that the economy still has its troubles, it is better off than it was back then. The misery index stands at 9.9 percent, less than half the level in the comparable 1980 period.
By whose measure? So the factories leaving was a good thing and made us all happy?
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Also see: MSM Monitor: Romney's Reminisce
