Rove Claims Stock Market Is Dropping Because Obama Hasn’t Named His Treasury Secretary Yet

Yesterday, stocks plunged for the second straight day, bringing “the Dow’s two-day drop to 873 points, or 10.6 percent, its worst two-day percentage loss since October 1987.” On Fox News last night, former Bush adviser Karl Rove tried to pin the blame for the drop on President-elect Barack Obama. Though he admitted that there had been bad economic news yesterday, Rove questioned “how mu More.. ch of it is the news of the day.” “I mean, how much of it is that, and how much of it is the market saying, You know what? The economy is not in a good place and we’re looking at the future, and how much confidence should we have in the team that’s coming to make the economy better any time soon?,” said Rove. He then suggested that the problem was that Obama hadn’t named his Treasury Secretary yet: ROVE: Well, I got to tell you, I’m a little bit surprised. If the number one issue facing the country is the economy, then it strikes me the new administration, the president-elect, would be putting a lot of emphasis on getting a Treasury secretary and an economic team in place in order to signal to the country what he’s going to do. But instead, we’ve seen a leak about the secretary of state. We’ve seen pretty serious rumors about who’s going to be attorney general, pretty serious rumors about who’s going to be head of HHS, Health and Human Services, who’s going to be Homeland Security counsel — Homeland Security department chief. Though some economic analysts believe it would be helpful for Obama to name his econ team, it is laughable for Rove to blame the market’s problems on Obama. Indeed, the market is much more likely reacting to yesterday’s “grim economic data,” which included “a 16-year high in weekly unemployment claims and the failure of Congress to reach a deal to help U.S. automakers.” Rove says the market is “trying to look four months, six months, a year in advance.” That may be so, but anyone hedging their bets is probably much more conc...

Channel: LiveLeak Video Length: 0s Date Found: Fri, Nov 21 2008 8:01 PM Category: Government Date Produced: Fri, Nov 21 2008 12:00 AM View Count: 22