or so says this article in Insight Magazine online, by John Berlau, and read how President Reagan's handiwork was responsible for the boom.
[size=4]Recession Shock[/size=4]
Posted Dec. 7, 2001 By John Berlau
John Shad, who headed the SEC under Ronald Reagan, exempted small firms from many regulations, making it easier for them to raise money. But the Clinton-era SEC hurt small businesses, which led to a weakened economy.
For nearly 20 years it was the boom that couldn't end. Although Bill Clinton loved to take the credit, the prosperity of the 1980s was part of "one continuous boom since the early 1980s," says Brian Wesbury, chief economist at the brokerage firm of Griffin, Kubik, Stephens & Thompson in Chicago. From 1982 to 2000, save only for two quarters in the early 1990s, the United States experienced such economic growth and prosperity as she never before had seen. Almost 35 million new jobs were created. The Dow Jones industrial average rose thirteenfold, dramatically increasing the wealth of middle-Americans invested in 401(k) plans and mutual funds.
Then suddenly, a few months before George W. Bush took office, it all seemed to come to an end.
What happened? Conventional wisdom has it that much of the growth was a bubble in which Internet and technology stocks were bid out of sight by speculative mania. But some observers notice that something else was going on at the time the markets started to fall: The Clinton Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), led by Chairman Arthur Levitt, was busy dismantling reforms from the Reagan administration that had made it easier for small businesses to raise money from the stock market.
Economist Lawrence Kudlow puts the time of the fall of the NASDAQ high-tech market as March 2000. This is almost precisely when, through a series of administrative rules, Levitt's SEC blocked small entrepreneurial firms from the access to capital markets that they'd enjoyed since the early 1980s, says Don Devine, senior scholar of the American Conservative Union's Task Force on Regulatory Reform and director of the Office of Personnel Management in the Reagan administration. "Unlike most of the times in the past, it looks like this was a stock-market-led recession," Devine tells Insight. "Levitt and Clinton disrupted the markets, and then the [shocked] market led to the weakening of the economy."
With the Democratic Party preparing a national advertising campaign to bemoan the alleged "Bush recession," Devine, who is reputed to be as politically savvy as they come, thinks Republicans should set the record straight about what he calls the "Clinton-Levitt recession."
There are signs that some Republicans may be following his advice....
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Eric The(GodBlessReagan!)Hun[>]:)]