Nagberi. Obama you have not only made Dr Martin Luther King Jr 's dream a reality but have also shown the world that America is a country that really recognize democracy and freedom for everyone no matter your race, religion or culture. The road to recovery is long and together we will make. God bless America.
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1: Barack Obama
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How to restore confidence? It's not as easy as it sounds. After all, George W. Bush has pretty consistently projected an air of confidence, one that tends to get people even more worried than they need to be. Perhaps this is because Bush's calm often seems utterly disconnected from the realities around him; he appears thoroughly unaware of the facts on the ground, whether in Iraq, Louisiana or Afghanistan. Like Bush, Franklin Roosevelt also projected optimism, but he took great pains to recognize and describe the depth of the difficulties the country faced. In his first fireside chat, Roosevelt explained the basics of banking to the American people and then asked for their help in getting the system working again. "It is your problem no less than mine," he said, enlisting them in the cause at hand.
The next step is to give people a sense that the financial system is stable and predictable. Swensen, who after Warren Buffett is perhaps the most successful investor in recent decades, argues that this has been the crucial flaw in the Bush administration's actions. "Markets need certainty and predictability," he says. "And the administration's actions have actually increased uncertainty and unpredictability. Its measures have been ad hoc, its response to each institution has been different, its reasoning has been opaque—all this creates confusion, and that drives capital away." Swensen's own solution is a simple and systemic one: have the government guarantee all money-market funds, with no limits, for six months. He argues that the government has to eliminate some degree of risk in order to get people to borrow and lend again. "Right now the government is not facilitating private capital flows; it is substituting for private capital flows. That doesn't solve anything."
The final way that Obama can create confidence is to reform the system itself. His administration will inherit a government that has taken on an extraordinary set of obligations in the private sector—ownership in banks, guarantees of commercial debts, loans to the automobile industry. Carefully retreating from these obligations to restore a market economy will be as complex an exit strategy as the one from Iraq. But if Obama is able to reform government rules and regulation—and thus the American economy—it will give people around the world renewed confidence in the American system. It was only after Japan was able to put in place a new system of tough auditing, after all, that its own banking crisis abated.
Obama will find many dire challenges in his inbox, but none—not Iraq, not Russia, not Pakistan, China, Afghanistan—is as important as this one huge task: to restore confidence, certainty and reform to America. It's a lot easier said than done. But if he manages to pull it off, people might well start wondering whether Barack Obama has some supernatural powers after all.
COVER STORY: THE GLOBAL ELITE
The study of power is not only diverting (which Homer and Shakespeare knew), but illuminating. A biography of an ancient human impulse.
© 2009
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