It’s that bad.
Obama’s Chief Economic Adviser Austan Goolsbee quit his post after only 10 months.
Nile Gardiner at The Telegraph reported:
If last week wasn’t bad enough for President Obama with the release of a series of dire economic reports, this week is looking even worse, kicking off with the resignation on Monday evening of his chief economist Austan Goolsbee. On Friday Goolsbee struggled to explain an unexpected rise in unemployment figures, comically describing them as a “bump in the road”, hardly reassuring news to the nearly 14 million Americans who are now out of work.
After the announcement, Barack Obama paid tribute to his close friend and soon to be former adviser, with a surreal claim that his administration is actually generating “millions of jobs” at a time when the unemployment lines are actually growing.
Over the past several years, he has helped steer our country out of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And although there is still much work ahead, his insights and counsel have helped lead us toward an economy that is growing and creating millions of jobs.
It’s not hard to see why Goolsbee is leaving the administration to return to the safer confines of the University of Chicago School of Business, where he taught for 14 years. The economic data on the US economy is relentlessly bad, from rising jobless numbers and declining consumer confidence to a hugely depressed housing market.
