Jimmy Carter, the enigma.

reply to post by pavil


Only completely uneductated people contribute the "Boom" as you put it of the '90's to Clinton. I was working on Wall Street at the time and it was the running joke. Clinton had nothing to do with the stock market! Enough said. His economy was actually, by the numbers, one of the worst economies in 60 years, including Carter's. The stock market on the hand....well thats a differnet and much more interesting story.

I will enlighten you and the otheres here at ATS, but I am sure you will all have something negative to say about the truth, as it is coming from wall street (the source of the problem) and a republican (am I allowed to say that?).

In the 1990's the stock market was a beautiful thing. It made alot of people rich and made the rich even richer. It turned the average housewife into a stock jockey and allowed people to add 4 rooms to their house, put swimming pools in the back yard and send kids to college. BUT, it was the how and the why that is whats wrong. First off.....Greed is good, it allows people to take risk and be rewarded for it. Now, Greed is bad too. It was the greed of Wall Street in the 1990's that created this "problem" and we are still paying for it today.

The crux of the problem revolves around a PONZI scam (google it to see what it means). Wall Street and the Clinton administration perpetrated the largets Ponzi scam since the Dutch Tulip craze of 1636 (hence my statment below.....know your history or repeat it). In the early 1990's the jobs outlook was bleak and Washington turned to technology companies to provide a shot in the arm. There was a sincere push to speed things up and creat new technologies, but no need for the American public to "upgrade" to new systems. Hence the birth of Y2K. For those youngsters on here, that was the scare that the world would come to an end due to technology failures of our computers. We had just begun to let computers run our lives and most people were not able to understand this.

If the government said its time to upgrade, people listened....so Government and big business jumped on the ship and let it go. Washington pushed San Fransisco and silicon valley and they jumped at the chance. The whole Y2K bug was born. By the mid to late 1990's just about every fortune 500 company had set up a Y2K committee. They were reviewing their own systems and making all "necessary" upgrades. They also reviewed the systems of vendors and suppliers and made sure they too were complient...forcing smaller companies to upgrade their systems and spend money they really could not afford. This created hundreds of thousands of jobs. actually more than a million jobs were created including the private secotr and "consultants". This was huge for the Clinton administration. BUT, nothing was produced by these people. An economy is measured by production. This was the beginning of the US economy changing to a services economy.

A few things happened here. First off, these new computer companies needed capital to grow. Where did they turn??? WALL STREET. Wall Street was more than happy to bring these companies public. thousands of companies called on wall street and thousands others had wall street come knocking on their door. Wall Street would bill the company as a Y2K solutions company. The company would go public for about $18 and first trade would take place at $90. PROFITS PROFITS PROFITS. This went on for about 4 years, then it was hard to sell. So Wall Street turned to Al Gore's baby and started selling internet companies. We were told to push everything as an internet play. pets.com, toys.com ... you name it we pushed it. If an old fashioned company had an internet weg page, it was now a play on the internet. It drove stocks to all time highs. it was crazy and crazy money was made.

Clinton benefitted greatly from this. 1) it was his stock market, so it was his economy. BUT the economy did not exist. Nothing was being produced. There were no production increases, no innovations were being made. This allowed for the balanced budget...2) the treasury was collecting huge tax gains on investment by joe and jane six-pack from their stock trading. People would go home from work and get on their computers and buy and sell stocks. Holding stocks for 5 minutes could generate 15% gains. It was insane.

Like everything insane, things must come to an end. It did. Just about after Y2K was deemed a total DUD, companies were forced to lay off for lack of work. Some companies were able to convert themselve to software soltuions companies and remain solvent, but most crashed and burned. Toys.com went from $96 to $0. Pets.com stock became worth less than those silly pet socks they were selling. The only thing was Clinton was no longer President. A new president had taken over. George W. Bush was our leader and stuck with the failings of the prior administration. Companies collapsed under the new administration, with the biggest 2 being Worldom and Enron.

Enron was s pecial case, it was Wall Streets wet dream. We made so much money on that company it was insane. The concept of Enron was brilliant, btu again, they went from a company producing oil and gas equipment to an energy trading company. Whats the difference? Now they produced nothing!!!! There were no "real or hard" assets anymore. Just paper profits. Paper profits are easily maniputlaed and they were!!!!

We on wall street pushed it and pushed it as profits rose, BUT we knew the financial situation of the company and had what we called an Enron Put on the market. At certain levels of their stock price on the way down there were more and more covenants of their credit facilities going bad and they had to take extremem measures to correct this, diluting earnings. Everyone on Wall Street knew this and was heavily short enron. Enron was a victim of the game. The further down they went, the more money wall street made. Wall Street forced them into bankruptcy, because it was good for profits.

Presidents hould becareful of what they take credit for and what they want credit for.

Some day, when I am slow i woul dlike to create a thread about the economy vs. stock market thing. Or maybe I will just write a book

Now...everyone get back to work!


[edit on 12-10-2007 by traderonwallst

[edit on 12-10-2007 by traderonwallst]

Originally posted by grover

The little guy... you and me, the ones who work and buy are the driving force in the economy. If the average Joe feels comfortable, he spends and the economy grows. If he doesn't feel comfortable, he won't spend and the economy suffers.

You can have all the stock markers, industries, movers and shakers, banking concerns and all the congresses and politicians, and they still won't effect the economy like Joe Blow does.

So Bushes' Child Tax Credit was a brilliant plan to put more money back into the hands of the little guy to generate a better economy?

As a little guy my life under Bush has been a hell of a lot better than my 8 years under Clinton, but I just thank god that Carter was ONLY 4 years.

[edit on 12-10-2007 by Xtrozero]

The truth is that Jimmy Carter was a political nothing until he attended the Bilderberg group, and suddenly got mass amounts of positive tv coverage and exposure.

reply to post by Niall197


I remember reading a report about how little recent flying time the pilots who flew the disastrous Desert 1 mission had because of budget cuts.

I was surprised how little flying time they had because I had more recent flying time than they did and I still didn't have enough flying time to get my private pilot's license yet.

He was too much of a pacifist to be an effective President and micro-manager on top of that. The Desert 1 fiasco happened because they had to land to refuel the helicopters. Why not use C-130's that could have refueled them in the air? There was no fighter air cover or bomber support for the rescue mission. The plan had no action that could prevent the Iranian Air Force from shooting down the rescue aircraft on their way out of the country.

Capturing an embassy is an act of war. President Carter failed to respond appropriately.

It is no secret that the current President of Iran was a guard during the hostage crisis. President Bush had opportunities to have him arrested on war crimes charges and did nothing.

reply to post by intrepid


I agree with the "healing from a long war", but not the "lost the war".

Remember the "Paris Peace Accords"?

We signed a peace treaty, our POWs were returned.

We brought our troops home from South Vietnam.

Then North Vietnam violated the treaty and invaded South Vietnam.

No country complained. Congress violated all our agreements with South Vietnam and cut off funding.

Then South Vietnam collapsed. and we evacuated our embassy in Saigon.

That doesn't sound like "we lost the war" to me, but I wouldn't argue with "Declared victory, quit, and went home!"