The White House, in a rebuttal to a
Federal Reserve study, said the “entire decline” of almost 39
percent in household wealth reported by the central bank
occurred before President Barack Obama took office and that much
of the wealth has returned.
“The numbers are a tough and brutal snapshot of the
financial crisis and housing bubble that President Obama
inherited,” White House economists Gene Sperling and Jason Furman wrote in an official blog posted today. All of the
decline in wealth occurred before Obama took office on Jan. 20,
2009, they said.
The June 11 report, released five months before
presidential and congressional elections, showed almost every
demographic group experienced losses during the 2007-2010 period
of study. The losses may hurt retirement prospects for middle-
income families, who are the focus of Obama’s re-election
effort.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has
criticized Obama’s handling of the economy, including that the
U.S. unemployment rate rose last month even as the Fed
maintained record stimulus and after Obama’s $830 billion
stimulus program.
The U.S. economy grew more slowly in the first quarter than
previously estimated, expanding at a 1.9 percent annual rate,
down from a 2.2 percent prior estimate. Retail sales in the U.S.
fell in May for a second month, the Commerce Department reported
today, another sign the U.S. economy is cooling.
The financial crisis wiped out 18 years of gains for the
median U.S. household net worth, with a 38.8 percent plunge from
2007 to 2010 that was led by the collapse in home prices, the
Federal Reserve study showed.
Wealth Rising
Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, and
Furman, its principal deputy director, said in the White House
blog that wealth “has risen every year” since Obama came to
office, though it hasn’t fully recovered.
The economists said household wealth fell 24 percent
between the third quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2009,
when George W. Bush was president. They said Americans’ net
worth grew by 15 percent between the first quarter of 2009 and
the third quarter of 2010.
“Household wealth has risen every year President Obama has
been in office, by a total of 23 percent overall,” Sperling and
Furman wrote, citing gains the in value of mutual funds,
increasing bank deposits and gains in stock values, aided by
stabilizing home values.
Even so, they said, “These data show that wealth still has
not fully recovered from the worst recession since the Great
Depression and reinforces how much more work we have to do.”
No comments:
Post a Comment