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Two Months After Saying the Marketplace is Important, the President Decides to Ignore It.

jimmiebjr | March 8, 2009 | Reply

I had seen this quote earlier and choked back a couple blog posts because plenty of other folks were taking their whacks at the President. I can’t criticize him too hard for not knowing much about the private sector. After all, it’s not like he’s spent any real part of his life working a joe job for a paycheck. But I saw something else a couple of days ago that made me reconsider. Here’s the President’s quote.

You know, the stock market is sort of like a tracking poll in politics. It bobs up and down day to day, and if you spend all your time worrying about that, then you’re probably going to get the long-term strategy wrong.

Well, okay. So what changed his mind in two months?

…but the markets are obviously a slightly different situation. Right now, given the sensitivities of the market, I’ve got to pay some attention to market psychology because part of what we have right now is such a loss of trust in both the marketplace and in government that restoring that confidence, restoring that trust is going to be very important. I’m not going to part of watching the crawl at the bottom of an interview. What I will be doing is making sure that I’m communicating with key market participants on a regular basis, again, to explain to them what exactly our plans are and to solicit from them good ideas.
[Emphasis mine]

Could it be that the “key market participants” got a good look at his plans and heard what he had to say, then decided to get their money the heck out of his way?

So now, having had his plans utterly rejected by the marketplace, the President has decided to blow off the marketplace entirely.

And it only took him two months.