American politics are more complicated than a Rubik’s Cube. There are delegates, pledge delegates, super delegates, unseated delegates – and we haven’t even started to think about the presidential election in November. To those of us in the rest of the world, it’s weird.
The U.S. Economy and Small Business
The U.S. economy has become a bellwether for the state of world economics due to the sheer size of the country’s GDP. The U.S. produces more than Germany, Japan and the UK combined.
During the Bush administration, we saw economic good times for a few years with the Dow just peaking out at the 14K level but since then it’s been down significantly.
The dollar continues to weaken against foreign currencies – especially the Euro – the sub-prime mortgage disaster is draining equity from U.S. homes (80% of assets owned by Americans are in their homes), commodities markets are reaching new highs on oil, corn, wheat and precious metals, which in turn fuels the U.S. inflation rate, currently running at 4%.
It has been clear the Americans want a change from the failed economic policies of the Bush administration – from Greenspan’s devaluation of U.S. currency (at one point available to institutions at 1%) to Bernanke’s Chinese water torture approach to economy management. Despite a couple of drops in U.S. lending rates (including one of 50 basis points) the U.S. economy is in the dumps.
Which leads me to:
Barack Obama – Economist’s Rookie of the Year
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