Barack Obama

[randolph]

Re: Tracy's post Bush warnings
The repeated requests by Bush to do something is not surprising. If Bush could get congress, to do something and we got a recession then Bush could blame Congress. Also, Congress did not want to do anything for the same reason. The Bush sequence of warnings shows that the Bush administration was aware that things were going wrong for years and did nothing. Bush did not need Congress to do something, the Treasury and the Fed could have done something to calm down the financial system. Greenspan could have simply raised interest rates to calm things down. The extremely low rates produced and excess of liquidity that the financial markets had to deal with, which resulted in the abuses that led to the meltdown. The booming housing market and stock market were good for Bush and helped compensate for the bad news from Iraq and his low ratings.