Now that the presidency is safe from a ?third Bush term,? Newsweek must feel free to admit that the current economic woes cannot be blamed entirely on the 43rd president and his administration.
Here?s what the magazine has to say this week about former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin:
[B]y the end of the 1990s, economic orthodoxy in the Democratic party was known as Rubinomics (a term Rubin himself would never use), meaning, roughly, a belief in free trade, fiscal restraint, and deregulation of financial markets. Pretty much everyone who really knew and understood the interaction of Washington and the marketplace had worked for Rubin. It is no wonder that so many of President-elect Obama’s top economic players, including his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and his chief economic adviser Larry Summers, are Rubin prot?g?s.
It’s all perfectly logical and explicable, except that Rubin arguably helped create the financial crisis that Obama now must fix. As Treasury secretary, Rubin pushed to allow banks to get into riskier businesses, and as a high-level official at Citigroup for the past nine years he and his colleagues at Citi have presided over the near collapse of an institution that will require a massive taxpayer bailout because it is too big to fail.
Ignoring for a moment the false implication that fiscal restraint and markets freed from excessive regulation caused our current problems, it?s interesting to note that Newsweek made no mention before the election about a Clinton-era figure bearing some responsibility.
Not wanting to make the same mistake as Newsweek, I won’t leave the false impression that the Bush administration bears no blame for the current economy. John Hood expressed the problem quite well here.
