That’s why Bill Clinton is president. Last Tuesday, in harmony with Brit counterpart Tony Blair, Clinton accomplished something even the Great Greenspan couldn’t pull off. The Big Guy managed to cool the red-hot U.S. economy by blowing up the tech-heavy Nasdaq. Now there’s leadership for you!
The master plan behind this noble feat? There was none. Write it off as political buffoonery. Clinton and Blair issued a murky joint statement that Wall Street interpreted as a future ban on gene patenting. Biotech stocks went south and telecom shares followed close behind.
Embarrassed by the mess it created, the White House scrambled to set things right. It’s all a big misunderstanding, cried the administration! But it was too late; the damage had been done.
Wall Street, cognizant as everyone else about the White House’s credibility gap, played it safe. Investors began fleeing the Nasdaq and started picking up blue chip bargains elsewhere. The Dow roared.
Who got blamed? Not Clinton, who always seems to have Lady Luck at his side.
Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, it turns out, has become the fall guy. He’s accused of targeting stocks as a cornerstone of his monetary policy. But this is a bad rap. Nasdaq all but ignores Greenspan every time he raises interest rates.
The high-tech industry need only thank Clinton-Blair for its fall from grace last week. I can just hear ’em yelling at Clinton in disgust, “It’s the New Economy, stupid.”
Against the backdrop of the tech tumble was the low-tech spectacle of truckers, horns blaring, rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol to protest rising diesel prices. Truckers want the fuel excise tax repealed.
But that’s not the tax lawmakers inside the Capitol were trying to get off the books last Thursday. Nope, they were pumping up new legislation to kill the 3 percent federal excise tax on phone calls-a measure sure to resonate with the truckers that approached.
As carefully as campaigns are choreographed, even the most savvy of political handlers cannot control wild cards.
No doubt, high-tech stocks are overvalued and were due for a correction. Greenspan did his damndest to make it happen, but couldn’t. Only Clinton-the Great Catalyst-could save the New Economy from itself. Here’s to a presidential legacy of DNA and a genome gaffe.
Well, I thought to myself, all this is interesting: high-tech and energy on the fritz the same week. Then my thoughts drifted to the 2000 presidential race.
At just the moment Al Gore, stepfather of the Internet, appeared to being picking up momentum, THIS: plummeting high-tech shares, skyrocketing fuel prices and the specter of inflation on the horizon.
C’mon now, Dubya, wipe that smirk off your face.
