Shameless Tactics

These people have no shame! Just a few short weeks ago they were telling us that the "economic crisis" would become a "catastrophe" that could cause a "complete economic meltdown" and a "depression" if congress didn't pass the pork-laden, misnamed, "economic stimulus package". Now that they have their bill passed, they are telling American citizens that we must stop being "excessively fearful". Who the hell are the fearmongers, you criminals? Disgusting...


Summers: 'Excess of fear' must be broken

Mar 13 12:07 PM US/Eastern
By JIM KUHNHENN and TOM RAUM
Associated Press Writers

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama's top economic adviser said Friday the nation's economic crisis has led to an "excess of fear" among Americans that must be broken to reverse the downturn.

"Fear begets fear," Lawrence Summers, the president's director of the National Economic Council, told a forum.

"It is this transition from an excess of greed to an excess of fear that President Roosevelt had in mind when he famously observed that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself," Summers said. "It is this transition that has happened in the United States today."

Summers spoke amid new signs of a deepening recession. The U.S. trade deficit plunged in January to the lowest level in six years as the economic downturn cut America's demand for imported goods, the Commerce Department reported Friday.

The economic adviser, who was treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, said it's still too early to gauge the broad impact of the administration's recovery program.

"But it is modestly encouraging that since it began to take shape, consumer spending in the U.S., which was collapsing during the holiday season, appears, according to a number of indicators, to have stabilized," Summers told the Brookings Institution, a think tank.

Summers was asked by a member of the audience what the nation's business community could do to help speed the recovery.

"What we need today is more optimism and more confidence," Summers said.