i'm not sure the eisenhower administration counts as 3 seperate recessions.
I'm sure we can dispute a number of the recessions. But, rather than picking and choosing which I agreed with, I simply deferred to the call made by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is as close as we have to an official arbiter of business cycle dates. They count three separate Eisenhower recessions.
I think the reputation of that era for boom times is based in large part on relief, following years of hardship, first from the Great Depression, then WWII, then the Korean War. People had grown up with a severely depressed economy, followed by wartime scarcities and rationing, and they were suddenly in a normal economy for the first time in decades. I'm sure it looked damned good to them in context. But, by modern standards, it wasn't great. Look at pretty much any indicator of economic performance and his time ranks very low among the post-war presidents.
http://www.forbes.com/2004/07/20/cx_da_0720presidents.html
Of the ten presidents in that era (which stopped before GW Bush), Eisenhower was 8th for GDP growth, 7th for disposable personal income, ninth for employment, ninth for unemployment, and seventh for inflation. The only one where he was even median was deficit reduction. Granted, with GW Bush now added to the ranks, and likely coming in last for most of those indicators (other than inflation), Ike will have creeped up the rankings in relative terms. But it still isn't great.
reagan's "recession" was the result of cleaning up 4 years of carter "staglation"
I could argue that Carter's "recession" was a result of the same thing: Paul Volcker hiking interest rates to address the inflation problem that had taken hold starting in the Nixon and Ford eras. After all, Volcker became the Fed Chairman in August of '79 and immediately started hiking interest rates severely -- effective federal funds rates were 13.78% by December of '79, and a recession predictably started in January 1980. He slashed rates in June 1980, and the recession ended. Then he hiked them again in late 1980 and in 1981, and we got another recession -- then he cut them by over half later in the 80s and we got a boom.
So, there's some truth to the notion that those recessions were at least as much about monetary policy for fighting inflation as about any presidential leadership. So, say I stipulated that you could strike the Reagan recession if I could strike the Carter recession? Then the new rankings would be 8 to 0, with ALL the modern recessions starting under Republicans. Better?
no quarrel on the 2007 recession - it was, in fact caused by a democrat controlled congress serving during the bush administration. they championed the idea that fannie mae and freddie mac should "mainstream" the riskiest mortgage products to customers. even barney frank admits that now.
Fannie and Freddie had almost nothing to do with the meltdown. For starters, the greatest inflation of the market happened at exactly the time when Fannie and Freddie were doing the smallest share of the lending:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/things-everyone-in-chicago-knows/
Fannie and Freddie also weren't major players in the move to subprime lending. The Federal Reserve has studied this and found that 84% of subprime mortgages, in the peak of the bubble, were by private lenders (and only 1 out of 25 of them was pressured by government to lend to minorities).
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/10/12/53802/private-sector-loans-not-fannie.html
And there wasn't any significant disproportion of default rates between the subprimes attributable to the government, and those that were independent from the government. They both defaulted at about the same rate:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business...reddie-didnt-cause-the-housing-crisis/250121/
This was principally a private-sector fools-gold rush, with the government lenders just along for the ride.
If Fannie and Freddie were the driving players, what we'd expect to see would be a housing decline that was mostly confined to cheaper homes (Fannie and Freddie don't do jumbo mortgages), and which didn't really take off in places where many homes are investment properties and vacation homes, like the Sun Belt (Fannie and Freddie have various rules that make most of their loans go to owner-occupied primary residences). And, of course, if Fannie and Freddie were the driving players, there wouldn't have been a meltdown in commercial real estate, which they don't do, nor a meltdown in foreign housing markets, which they can't touch, nor would the contagion have spread to the financial markets (since Fannie and Freddie had no ability to force investment banks to buy up those mortgages, securitize and resell them, etc. That was a private-sector decision).
Right-wingers have been trying to find a way to blame the government for the financial meltdown from the start, since the alternative is to recognize it as a classic private sector market failing: a speculative bubble followed by a crash. For those who worship private markets, the idea that they could fail is hard to swallow, no matter how many times they watch it happen. So, some bit player like Fannie and Freddie will be selected and blamed for the problem, even when any serious look at the data will make it clear that their mistake was simply mirroring what the private sector was doing.
