EconomicCrisis.US

Balancing cautious celebration with sober warnings, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told the Detroit Economic Club the Obama administration will exit from its 2009 investments to rescue General Motors and Chrysler even if it doesn’t recoup every taxpayer dollar.

“We didn’t do this to maximize our return. We did this to save jobs,” said Geithner, who said the U.S. auto industry has added nearly 90,000 jobs since GM and Chrysler’s government-backed bankruptcies nearly two years ago.

On a day when the government announced that the U.S. economy grew at a slower-than-expected 1.8% rate in the first quarter, Geithner acknowledged “this is still a very tough economy for millions of Americans — including so many families here in Michigan.”
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Are the American people losing faith in the U.S. economy? The statistics that you are about to read might surprise you. Not everyone believes that the U.S. economy is dying (there are still millions out there that will swallow anything that the mainstream media tells them), but the reality is that there is a growing chunk of the population that has completely lost faith in our leaders and in our economic system. A brand new Gallup poll has found that the number of Americans that believe that we are in a “depression” is actually larger than the number of Americans that believe that the economy is “growing”. That is absolutely shocking because according to official government figures, the U.S. economy is growing right now and virtually nobody in the mainstream media or the government has used the term “depression” to describe the economic downturn that we went through recently. In fact, according to Gallup a total of 55% of the American people believe that we are either in a recession or a depression right now. This is clear evidence that the American people are losing faith in U.S. government economic statistics and instead they are basing their opinions on what they see in their own communities. Despite the pablum about an “economic recovery” constantly being spewed by Ben Bernanke and Barack Obama, faith in our economic system continues to decline. The truth is that the American people are not stupid. They can see what is happening to the economy.
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The financial crisis, which led to the recession from which the U.S. still has not recovered, began after the 2008 presidential campaign was well underway. Some have asserted that the economic crisis played a key role in President Barack Obama’s election. This is something of an overstatement. While the crisis, and the recession that followed, helped the challenger, Obama was the clear frontrunner by late summer of 2008. Other than John McCain’s surreal and brief suspension of his campaign allegedly to devote his attention to the crumbling economy, the recession played a relatively small role in the 2008 election as much of the storylines around the two candidates, such as the historic nature of Obama’s campaign and the widespread frustration with the Bush administration, had been established by the time the economy took its sharpest downward turn.
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The American economy slowed to a crawl in the first quarter, but economists are hopeful that the setback will be temporary.

Total output grew at an annual pace of 1.8 percent last quarter, the Commerce Department said Thursday, after having expanded at an annualized rate of 3.1 percent at the end of 2010.

When the year first began, economists had been expecting a much more robust growth rate of about 4 percent, only to be barraged by bad report after bad report as the days wore on. Higher commodity prices and winter blizzards that shuttered businesses and delayed construction were among the main causes of the slowdown, along with a large decrease in federal government spending and a sharp increase in imports, which are subtracted from output.
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