Obamanomics

The Obama administration's economic policies, in my view, stand for continuity you can believe in. We are still giving away vast sums to the same people, with the same result, so bank profits are way up, unemployment is up …c and we are not seeing the transformation of our economy this crisis calls for. The administration did not push for legislation to give judges the power to reform mortgages in a bankruptcy. How could they not do this? It is fundamental, it is right, it would help the middle class that we supposedly care about.

Small and medium-sized business cannot borrow, even though we have given trillions of dollars to the megabanks that came crawling to Washington to say, "Please, please, we can't pay our bonuses."

Steve, you're right, GM had better numbers today. In the third quarter they only lost $1.12 billion. Congratulations! We're on the road to recovery! Do you know where they saw improvement? In their China subsidiaries, sales are up 20, 30, 40 percent. Sales in the U.S. are down. They will not survive. Chrysler will probably go over the cliff as well. They're going to be selling Fiats. It won't work. Let's be real about this. We have lost a third of our manufacturing jobs in the last decade. That is the core of our economy. We cannot all be lawyers and investment bankers. We need clients.

The fundamental error of this administration is they have embraced the Bush view that if you solve the problem of big banks everything else flows from that. They are wrong. Too big to fail is still too big.

Eliot Spitzer, Newsweek, 21-Nov-2009