There are many ironies in the fact that President George W. Bush will throw the first pitch at Major League Baseball's All-Star Game in New York. For one, President Bush is the first managing general partner of a Major League team (the Texas Rangers) to become President of the United States.President Franklin Roosevelt was the first to attend an All-Star Game and throw out the first pitch, starting the tradition. He too had to deal with a poor economy and by the time he threw out that first ball the groundwork was being laid for World War II. President Bush has had to contend with his own war.
While there are differing views as to whether we should have gone into Iraq and whether we should stay or get out, this will always be viewed as George's war, fair or not. And the state of our economy in 2008 will also be viewed as George's economy, fair or not.
The ultimate irony for me is that Yankee Stadium is scheduled to be torn apart at the end of the season. This is YANKEE Stadium and the last president to set foot in it will be George W. Bush. The stadium with the greatest heritage in baseball, the 'House That Ruth Built', is going to be torn apart while our economy is also being torn apart. It is being torn out at its roots.
Major manufacturing jobs are being lost every day. But that's not the roots. The financial sector is crumbling to dust, but that is not the roots. Housing and construction are gasping for air. But that is not the roots. The roots of the United States of America have been and always will be the people and their ideas. We are a nation founded on ideals and ideas. These are being tested severely.
The negativity in the marketplace creates a dampening of our spirit but not the end of our reign as a nation of ideals and ideas. The confidence that people are lacking and that the Federal Reserve is trying to shore up will be restored, even as things are at their worst.
In my mind, President Bush has been a man with ideals. Unfortunately, he has not been a man with many ideas nor has he had much respect for people of differing ideas. This was underscored by the trio of "my way or the highway" guys -- Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Karl Rove.
However, when Bush throws that baseball it will symbolize to me the rounding of third base for his administration, the end of a grand piece of Americana and the bottom of our recession. A new president, be he Democrat or Republican, will bring new ideas and a new stadium and be the beginning of a new era. The bottoming out of our bad situation does not mean a rapid rise but we are a nation of success stories and the new stories will soon be set in motion even as the old ones wear on. But it is hard to see it sometimes when you are in the middle of the storm.
Food for thought:
- When folks are taking money out of one bank they are usually putting it in another. That we have not read about. Are deposits increasing at J. P. Morgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) or Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC)? A quick call to my Wells Fargo VP, Sherry, informed me deposits have been on the rise, significantly.
- Brokerage houses and investment banks like Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER) and Lehman Brothers (NYSE: LEH) are suffering but Charles Schwab (NASDAQ: SCHW) did not stick its neck out and looks to clean up going forward.
- After the airlines go down for the third time, what will emerge? Is the stage being set for Southwest Airlines(NYSE: LUV) to make another three decade run?
By the time the "Boys of Summer" start spring training next year everything will look very different.
Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm. He writes the columns Chasing Value and Serious Money. Disclosure: I own shares of WFC.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-15-2008 @ 3:03PM
Bernie R. said...
Who cares about your political view of President Bush?
Presidents do not control economies. Congress has failed again, either due to stupidity or on purpose, by cutting off access to OUR OWN energy supplies because they are owned by Marxist "environmentalists".
If 50% of "the People" were not brainwashed, fearful liberals, democrats, socialists, etc., this country would be an economic powerhouse like we used to be back in the more Conservative 1940s and 1950s.
Programs implemented by liberals from the1930s through the 1970s are bearing their rotten fruit today. Bankrupt programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid have turned tough, entreprenurial, risk-taking, Capitalists into whiny, selfish, government dependants, waiting for the government (i.e. TAXPAYERS) to pay for their retirement, their health care, their education, and many other basics in life.
At least President Bush CAN throw a first pitch. I am sure a President Kerry would have his Butler throw for him, and if President Hillary were to do it, she would have to throw underhanded...(like her political motivations...)
7-15-2008 @ 4:24PM
NYCBanker said...
Yes, the conservative 1940s, when those Iron fisted right wing zealots FDR and Harry Truman ran the country.
Giving the oil companies a land grab sounds great, in fact it is great for me because i have a large position in exxon mobil. But as far as gas prices go, American oil will be sold into the world market(to China and India) and oil will still cost $150- $200 a barrel, because, China and India's demand will continue to increase exponentially(sorry for the big word).
Start drilling tomorrow and you wont see a drop for 8-12 years, and by then oil will be $200-250.
Welcome to the global economy Bernie. Now leave the complex thinking up to us.
7-15-2008 @ 4:11PM
Jeff said...
LOL. I am a republican. I can make baseless analogies which degrade the opposition. That makes me 100% right. You would understand that math, if you weren't taught by some weed smoking liberal save the earth while ending society hippie.
7-15-2008 @ 4:39PM
NYCBanker said...
Oh and yes, George Bush is a mans man. He is just your average everyday rancher. Except that hes from NEW ENGLAND, hes from a family of RICH ARISTOCRATS, hes the son of a VICE PRESIDENT and SENATOR, who was the son of another SENATOR. Thats about as elite as you get.
7-18-2008 @ 9:02PM
rick said...
Who is the person who started the false thought that it would take 8 to 12 years to get oil out of the ground. Obviously, it was not an oil man(excuse me, person). If the land is leased and ready for exploration, a rig can be standing in about 3 to 6 months. Drilling time varies but it is usually no more than 3 months. Completion is dependent upon a few variables, but 4months would be a long wait. Add it up, From rig arrival to production in about 9 months to a 1 year. Of course if an endangered poisonous snake slithers by it's all out the window.
7-30-2008 @ 9:26PM
successln said...
T. Boone Pickens is an oil man who actually made (a lot of) money in the oil business, in comparison to Bush who lost (a lot of) other people's money.
In spite of the fact that T. Boone Pickens lost money when he invested in Yahoo! recently in the expectation that the stock value would be boosted if Microsoft was successful in its takeover, he is currently advising that we cannot drill our way out of this oil crises, but rather concentrate on alternative energy development and increased fuel efficiency - a position that the Democrats have been advocating for over thirty years, and the Republicans have been blocking for the same period of time. Remember the oil crises in the 1970's when President Carter pushed through fuel efficiency mandates, which Reagan and Bush promptly killed when they got into office?
That is the exact opposite position that Bush, Cheney and other Republicans are taking when they demand that we drill, drill, drill. The fact that they are pushing for drilling in ANWR, which, even if it was a successful drilling operation, wouldn't benefit the United States because most of that oil would be shipped to Southeast Asia, because oil companies aren't particularly patriotic. They don't care about the country that they built their fortunes in and on. They are multinationals who will sell their oil to the highest bidder. They move their headquarters to foreign countries to avoid paying American taxes, just like Halliburton (the company that Cheney was CEO of, and makes a lot of their money in the oil drilling equipment business), which is relocating its HQ to Dubai.
Conservatives always like to go to ancient history to blame someone else for the problems that we have in our society today. But the fact is that Republicans have been in the White House for 20 of the last 28 years, and have held control of the Congress for 12 of the last 14 years.
And the fact is that, if we had continued on with fuel efficiency standards that we started in the Carter Administration, we wouldn’t need to import any oil to satiate our thirst for oil.
We are importing 70% of our oil today, vs 24% of our oil during the Carter Administration, and there is no way that we could eliminate that 70% of our consumption, purely by drilling for our own. We don’t have the oil reserves, and the oil companies are currently not drilling in 75% of the leases that they held prior to Bush lifting the offshore oil drilling bans that were put into place by Reagan and Bush. The oil companies have also shut down some of their oil refining operations so that they could make higher profits. If Republicans claim that they should have built more refining operations here at home, then why didn’t they get it done when they had control of Congress for the first six years of the Bush Administration, and the last six years of the Clinton Administration?
And if the oil companies weren’t drilling and refining when they had complete control of Congress and the White House, what makes you think they will do it now, or even if McCain were to be successful in winning the White House?
Conservatives claim that speculation has little effect on the price of oil, but Enron proved that wrong, when they more than quadrupled energy prices and forced rolling blackouts in California. Even recently, when Bush dropped the offshore drilling ban, Republicans quickly claimed that oil prices dropped quickly because of the lift on the ban – not on the finding and refining of more oil. That is SPECULATION. So Republicans admitted that speculation DID have a lot to do with oil pricing when it was politically advantageous for them to do so.
But in reality, the oil prices probably dropped because demand had dropped. The price of gas was so high, most people couldn’t afford to keep buying it in the same quantities as they had in the past. That increased the available reserves of gas by billions of gallons in the past few months.
But once again, the recent announcement that the reserves weren’t as high as they were thought to be, just caused the price of oil to jump $4 a barrel. So much for speculation not having any effect.