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Comment by dcftoapv | Hacker News Reader

Obama's admin let one of the world's foremost financial institutions fail and caused a mass market panic / giant economic setback. Their reasoning was entirely political and caused millions of people to lose their jobs. I'm independent, but claiming that Republicans cause recessions is pretty ironic considering the economic damage the last Democratic admin did.

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Yes, Obama was President from 2000 to 2008 when the Fed let the subprime lending happen with stupid monetary policies. The crash happened in 2008 when Bush was still President.

A few days later, Lehman Brothers began to falter. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who in July had publicly expressed concern that continuous bailouts would lead to moral hazard, decided to let Lehman fail. The fallout from Lehman's failure snowballed into market-wide panic. AIG, an insurance company, had sold credit default swaps insuring against Lehman's failure under the assumption that such a failure was extremely unlikely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_George_...

In that case, the recession began during Bush, who provided the first bailout around $800B. Obama did another bailout of similar amount.

I was talking about starting recessions, not digging out of them, so my statement holds.

If you're talking about Lehman Brothers, Wikipedia notes that the bankruptcy occurred on September 15, 2008, two months before Obama was elected.

Lehman Brothers? September 2008, before Obama was even elected.

So, how does that change your view?

That happened when Bush was president. Get your timeline straight.

Which financial institution are you referring to here?

Which one? The only big one I can think of that wasn’t bailed out was Lehman and that was under W, not Obama.

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