Economist Blasts Obama – Claims President Made Economy Worse

In a month of staff departures, declining poll numbers, and a still-stagnant jobs report, President Obama received yet another shot of disapproval from renowned economist Nasim Nicholas Taleb, author of the much read and highly regarded, The Black Swan.  In his comments against the Obama administration’s handling of the U.S. recession, Taleb described the administration’s actions in 2009 and 2010 akin to giving a cancer patient pain medication.  While making the patient feel better, it does nothing to actually treat the disease.

Said Taleb, “total debt is higher than it was in 2008 and unemployment is worse.”   Both claims are accurate, though supporters of Obama and the Democratic Party’s attempts to deal with the recession still maintain that those attempts prevented a greater worsening of the economy, and helped bring back the financial sector from the brink of total collapse.  Taleb disagrees with that assessment though, likening Obama’s actions as simply kicking the proverbial economic can down the road, and worsening an already alarming national debt crisis.

Taleb’s comments came before a Toronto audience, where he spoke glowingly of Canada’s economy, noting it had a far lower debt to GDP ratio than other large industrialized nations, and stated he was far more bullish on the Canadian economy than the United States.  Canada voted in Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2006 and since that time, it has initiated sweeping tax cuts, downsized its government, and tightened lending policy, all of which has many economists pointing to as primary reasons for the Canadian economy’s relative strength in comparison to other nations such as the United States, Great Britain, and Spain.