Here:
Home
>
Classroom
>
Social Studies
>
Current Events Archives
>
Politics
>
World
World
News
- -03-13-09 Summers: $50 Trillion in Global Wealth Erased (CBS News)
"Lawrence Summers, Director of the White House National Economic Council, at left, gave a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington this morning detailing why the economic crisis started and defending the Obama administration's strategy for combating it."
" 'On a global basis, $50 trillion dollars in global wealth has been erased over the last 18 months. This includes $7 trillion dollars in US stock market wealth which has vanished, and $6 trillion dollars in housing wealth that has been destroyed,' he said. 'Inevitably, this has led to declining demand, with GDP and employment now shrinking at among the most rapid rates since the second World War.' "
"Summers, the former Treasury Secretary under President Clinton and former president of Harvard University, was professorial in describing the crisis and relating it to prior downturns. But to boil things down, he said it comes down to an 'abundance of greed and an absence of fear on Wall Street' that led to the bubble. The recession and crisis were in turn caused by the reverse of that." 03-09
|
Back to
Top

© 2009 EDI
and Dr. R. Jerry Adams
|