Mainstream, Qualified

I like to think of myself in those terms. They give me a warm fuzzy when I look in the mirror and say "Gilles, you're mainstream enough, you're qualified enough, and doggone it, 8 people read your blog."

This seems to be the reaction to Bush Fed Chair pick Ben Bernanke as summarized by this quote here: "However, the main reaction will be a sigh of relief that he is one of the mainstream, qualified candidates."

This is quite telling that Wall Street was aprehensive Bush would pick a non-qulified, non-mainstream candidate. What ever would give them that idea? Oh yeah, Harriet Miers, Bush's crony unqualified pick for the Supreme Court. I suppose in this case it was quite reasonable for Wall Street to brace itself for a Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on completed keg stands by new Fed Chief Jenna Bush.

The popular democrat pick for the Fed was Robert Rubin. He generally has a good reputation on Wall St. and served as Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury. Since Bush took office he has been running Citi Group - the massive bank and financial service company based in New York. I thought it would be interesting to compare the dem's guru to the performance of Bush and the American economy overall in the last four years.

When Rubin took over, Citi's stock price was about $48. Today Citi is trading right around $44, roughly a 9% decline in that time.

As a proxy for the US economy I took the S&P 500 index. At the same time Citi was at $48, the S&P was at $1100. Today it is trading at about $1200, or roughly a 9% increase.

So at the same time US stocks were up 9%, the Democrats great economic guru lead one of our country's largest banks into a 9% decline. Granted I'm not digging too deep here and maybe Rubin saved Citi from a 30% decline or some other disaster, but as a general investor, I'd be much more pleased with a generic index of American stocks, all of which at the mercy of general American trends - than the stock specifically guided and directed by Rubin. Nor would I be interested in having him manage my mutual fund, let alone promoted to setting monetary policy for the whole country.

Try this next time a Democrat claims the economy stinks. Explain growth is up and Bush's economic record is better than Robert Rubin's - and watch their jaws drop and immediately go into how Bush is an idiot. This will be even more amusing to you if you get them calling Bush an evil genius earlier in the conversation about the recent spat of indictments.