National Loss Quotes
This is a tension that exists in almost every nation. Money invested abroad, may have substantial benefit to the individual investor, but very little to his country. In the worst case, American’s invest in building manufacturing facilities in foreign countries, which then use foreign labor to make products that are imported back to the United States. These investors have not only sent the capital made in America abroad, but also exported American jobs with it. Some countries have made laws limiting the export of capital but this rarely works. In America, this would be unconstitutional. The best a country can do is to be sure its productivity is competitive with the rest of the world. Also to provide the confidence that money invested in America is safe.
A videotape of this response was used by Kennedy as a campaign TV ad. American history had been full of anti-Catholic prejudice and it was responsible for the Presidential loss of Al Smith. Kennedy hit the issue directly betting that America had become more tolerant. He was right but he still lost several states because of religious bigotry.
In the Meldown of 2008 which caused the Great Recession, he, his Republican Predecessor and Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve Chairman, I the opinion of most on ideological economists saved the American economy from a collapse that would have been as bad or worse than the Great Depression. However, to accomplish that they had to in effect bail out the banks, 2 of the 3 American Auto companies, and the largest insurance company with taxpayer money. Worse, they could not do much for the millions of Americans whose homes were “under water” as a result of the banks’ handling of home mortgages and mortgage backed securities. To help them, they would have had to force the banks to admit that their assets were much lower than the banks were claiming and the banking and financial executives had to be appeased. Meanwhile, they had few other resources and did not provide any help to Main Street, small business or even small banks. Worse, they were intimidated into allowing the subsidized and saved banks to pay huge bonuses to their executives whose performance was terrible while millions of normal Americans were unemployed and the others were getting no increase in compensation. See {639655} for Geither’s explanation of the problem.
