Mister, we can't use a man like Herbert Hoover again.
Herbert Hoover is a catch-all for political and economic ineptitude in the face of a fiscal crisis. With the United States facing its latest economic slowdown, both parties are pointing fingers and accusing the other of embracing Hoover in some way.
Who is doing such pressuring these days? Not Bush, but that Hoovermonger, Charles Schumer. Schumer used the Bear Stearns collapse to call for "a greater degree of regulation" in the industry that is relevant this time, investment banking.
Hoover knew free trade was beneficial. But his party, the Grand Old Party, was the tariff party. So in spite of himself, he signed a big new tariff, the Smoot-Hawley act, triggering retaliation from U.S. trading partners.
For many decades now, Democrats have contrasted Hoover's concession to protectionists unfavorably with free-trade legislation written by Roosevelt and his globalization guru, Secretary of State Cordell Hull.
Today it is the Democrats who are doing wrong, and they know better. Candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both internationalists by temperament, yet they seem to be in a race to see who can repeal the North American Free Trade Agreement first.
Though Bush may be viewed as a laughingstock, he won't have the zero-integrity factors that have kept Nixon and Harding at the bottom in the presidential sweepstakes. Oddly, the president whom Bush most reminds me of is Herbert Hoover, whose name is synonymous with failure to respond to the Great Depression. When the stock market collapsed, Hoover, for ideological reasons, did too little. When 9/11 happened, Bush did too much, attacking the wrong country at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. He has joined Hoover as a case study on how not to be president.
Is the House of Gates ready to challenge Google?
It used to be that Microsoft was the biggest name in computing. It used to be that Yahoo! was the biggest name on the Internet. But in recent years, Google is the name that has dwarfed all others. Now Microsoft is attempting a hostile takeover of Yahoo.
Can a combined Microsoft-Yahoo challenge Google and make the Internet competitive again? Or does a merger mark a consolidation of Web power in just a few hands?
Meanwhile, in Washington, Google and Microsoft have been tormenting each other for years. When Google won the bidding with a $3.1 billion offer for Doubleclick last spring, Microsoft led the lobbying to derail the deal. The arguments sounded suspiciously like those Microsoft derided in the 1990s. Google can now be expected to return the favor, and it has been showering enough money around Washington to get a hearing for its scare stories about big, bad Microsoft.
Whether Yahoo shareholders like the deal or not is for them to decide, not Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl or Justice Department attorneys.
Who would ever have guessed you could feel sorry for Microsoft, that you could root for it as the underdog and only backstop to Google's complete takeover of all digits everywhere? -- there seems little cause for happiness here.
Google's eating everyone's lunch simply because it makes things faster, better and more useful than anyone else -- and Microhoo will have no better way than Yahoo and Microsoft did to replicate that engineering feat.
Even the most ardent Microsoft fan wouldn't accuse the firm of doing well by creating great things. Microsoft's biggest successes -- Windows, Office -- have been the product not of revolutionary code but of brilliant marketing and, more important, savvy business tactics.
It could be worse. But how much worse?
American employers cut 17,000 jobs last month -- the first such reduction in four years. President Bush called Friday's labor report "troubling," and it's tough to disagree. The loss of jobs is another indicator of a slowing economy. But policymakers and economists question whether the Bush stimulus is enough to avert a recession.
What should the government do, if anything, to spur the economy? Is America entering another recession, or something not quite as painful?
Congress' Joint Economic Committee recently created an Employment Recession Probability Index that uses changes in jobless claims and the unemployment rate. It has predicted every recession since World War II. What's it show today? Believe it or not, the likelihood the U.S. was in recession in January was 6% -- down from 35.5% in December.
So, yes, we've hit a slow patch. But no, despite the bleatings of a media establishment eager for "change" in Washington, we're not in a recession yet.
So the new labor report is out, and it says that nonfarm payrolls actually fell last month. On the other hand, employment growth for December was revised up.
You shouldn’t take any of this seriously. A better guide is probably to average the last 2 or 3 months. What you get then is that employment is still growing, but v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. In particular, employment growth is well short of what’s necessary to keep up with population growth. So even though it’s premature to say that jobs are shrinking, as a practical matter this makes no difference: the truth is that the jobs picture looks moderately dire.
He revised personal computing. Now he wants to revise Adam Smith.
Every year, some of the world's most powerful and influential leaders gather in Davos, Switzerland to talk about how to eradicate poverty, improve living conditions, and make the planet a better place. This year, Bill Gates, the world's richest man, talked about overhauling capitalism.
"We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well," Gates told world leaders at the forum.
Is Gates right? Or for all of his savvy as a businessman and technology pioneer, is the Microsoft founder far gone in utopian speculation?
Bill Gates is issuing a clarion call for a kinder capitalism to aid the world’s poor. Mr. Gates says he’s grown impatient with the shortcomings of capitalism. He thinks it’s failing much of the world, and he said as much in a speech today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This from a guy worth around $35 billion. (Give or take a billion.) What chutzpah.
It appears Gates is ignoring the global spread of free-market capitalism that has successfully lifted hundreds of millions of people up from poverty and into the middle class over the last decade or so. Think China. Think India. Think Eastern Europe.
If you look at what Gates actually said, he didn't call for governments to seize control of the means of production. Nor, truth be told, did he actually say anything profoundly new. He just wants to push for "an approach where governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities."
