Obama’s Big, Bold Bet

“The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation,” said Roosevelt. “It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

When you total up all the emergency economic policies that Mr. Obama has now put in place — a nearly $800 billion stimulus, mortgage relief, a private-public program for buying up toxic assets and a huge capital injection into the banking system by the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates and expand credit — they constitute one big experiment.

Together, these policies — call them Obama Rescue Phase I — represent a huge bet that the administration can confine this economic crisis to a really nasty recession, the sort of thing that might constitute a long chapter in an economic history and not a 21st-century Depression that would trigger a whole bookshelf on the theme of: “How Barack Obama Won an Election and Lost an Economy.”

Have no doubt, Phase II is coming. At best, it will require hundreds of billions of dollars more, at worst more than a trillion, to deal with more bad loans and toxic assets weakening the economy — problems that Phase I can’t fully absorb. Because unemployment is still rising — ensuring that the initial spate of mortgage defaults, which came from loans to people who could never repay, will be followed by another spate of defaults from those who could repay but now can’t because the deteriorating economy has stripped them of their jobs, their businesses or their credit lines.

看大国的起落，都是政府的行为所为，这并不是说政府什么都做，而是政府做得恰当。在美国人看来奥巴马的这次实验只会影响他的仕途和美国的经济，我却认为，这会影响到美国的“落”

孙子曰：不可胜在己，可胜在敌。竞争，胜利的一方都是犯错最少的一方。