Turns out he wasn't really a millionaire, but was fueling his lifestyle on debt. (I read that some years ago.) He was part of a survey group of millionaires that the author was interviewing for a marketing study, and unlike the rest, the fellow was flashy with his money and not at all restrained in his spending habits. It's like the fellow discussed in The Millionaire Next Door. It's what they tend to do when posed with the question of Bush's reckless fiscal behaviour, much like a guy defending his abuse of credit cards by pointing out how good his standard of living is now.Yep. I'm waiting for a Republitard to jump in here and say that the economy is great based on some "leading indicators" such as GDP growth, without acknowledging that current rates of GDP growth are heavily borrowed from the future via deficit spending. Nothing about it is sustainable, so recession is a given. Structurally, our economy is in awful shape compared to 2000. economy was headed for a recession without the Mid East problems. Their claims that "the world can't afford to let us fail" sound too much like a junkie saying there is no way a drug dealer would ever cut off his best customer.because he owed him so much already. In reality suspect that if inflation gets out of hand, that might shift to the Euro and surprise those conservative economists lacking imagination. The claim is that the rest of the world can't afford to do anthing but support the U.S. dollar and treasury securities will always be considered the primary safe harbour for the rest of the world. There are some major problems with the inflation approach to erasing debt. Even if the mid East was calm we would be looking at about $50-60/bbl in oil now due to demand growth. Any upset in supply will cause large swings in prices-so Mid East problems will certainly contribute, but they are not the underlying problem. The trigger is that demand is finally starting to outstrip supply on a long term forward looking basis. Oil prices alone are sufficient to trigger a recession and that is not really a function of the Mid East. I wouldn't attribute a recession to the Mid East though. That's why he never sweated the large deficits that were obviously going to result from Dubya's "free money" approach to budgeting and taxes. Yes, and the inflation back up plan is also part of Greenspan's implied approach too. If things don't go well, Bush has a back up plan. If the events in the Middle East throw the world into Global Recession, the possibly ensuing run away inflation would make the United States National Debt a pittance.
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