Does the election of Barack Obama, D-Illinois, who Tuesday will take the oath of office to become the 44th president of the United States, herald a new economic era?

American University professor and political historian Allan J. Lichtman, speaking Monday on CNN, went so far as to argue that it is the end of the conservative economic era ushered in by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and that the Obama election represents the start of a new liberal era.

In November 1980, Reagan won the presidency in a landslide, with Republicans capturing the Senate, in an election that marked the start of the Reagan Revolution of tax cuts, increases in defense spending, and decreases in the growth of social programs. Reagan's presidency ushered in a broad, secular trend toward privatization and free markets that would eventually encompass all of the world's major economies, including China, and the former Soviet Union, which disbanded in 1991.

The times, they are a changin'

During his Monday interview on CNN, Lichtman went so far as to say that Obama's election marks the end of economic conservatism and the start of new era of liberalism. However, in a column published on January 16 at Gazette.com, a Maryland Community Newspaper, he argued that "Obama should recognize that there is no consensus answer to recovery and reform, and experiment with a mix of market and regulatory approaches." Further, rather than 'governing from the center,' Lichtman said Obama should "move the middle to [him] them by changing the conversation about government and implementing programs that work."

Are public attitudes toward the U.S. government's economic policy linked to housing prices?

There are other factors involved, but over the past three decades there has been a correlation between the two conditions, The New York Times reported.

When home prices are rising at a pace moderately faster than inflation, consumers tend to think well of the U.S. Government's economic policies, The Times reported, citing Haver Analytics.

For example, during the U.S. housing market's two, prior housing booms, 1984-1987 during the Reagan Administration, and 1996-1998 during the Clinton Administration, consumers, on average, approved of the government's economic policies, The Times reported.

Billionaire investor George Soros believes the current financial crisis is the worst since the Great Depression, and said stocks have not bottomed yet, Bloomberg News reported Thursday.

Soros said the most recent market bottom "will probably not prove to be the final bottom," adding that the current stock rebound will last six weeks to three months as the United States moves closer to recession, Bloomberg News reported.

Further, Soros, in an op-editorial column in The Financial Times, argued that the cause of the market's current problems is a flawed premise: the belief that markets are self-correcting and tend toward equilibrium. They aren't and don't, Soros argues, and the laissez-faire policy creates bubbles, including the most-recent housing bubble, which, in turn, when it started to burst, led to the current credit crunch.

Soros cites deregulation

Soros added that the market's current troubles originated in 1980 when U.S. President Ronald Reagan and United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher led a laissez-faire movement that reduced/eliminated regulation of banks and financial markets, the FT reported.