Name: 奧巴馬政府。美國曆史速成班 #47 (Obamanation: Crash Course US History #47)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T05:21:26.000Z
Duration: 15 min 40 s
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情態副詞

Hi, I’m John Green, this is CrashCourse U.S. history and we’ve finally done it,

Ahh. Stan, says that history never ends but whatever we’ve reached the part that Me

From the Present is in. So we aren’t going to cover the astonishing

results of the 2016 presidential election. What we are going to do is try to talk about

historical events that are also current events. Future John Green here to tell you that in

a stunning turn of events the 2020 presidential election will be won by - Harry Styles. I

know that he’s English and under 35 but we’re going to change the constitution to

make it possible. Because… that’s how much we love Harry Styles in 2020.

Intro So when we last left George W Bush, his approval

rating was dropping to the lowest number in President of the United States approval rating

history. And the U.S. was facing what turned out to

be the 2nd worst economic crises in the past 150 years. A crisis that remains unnamed because

we’re kind of still in it. But I’d like to propose a couple names:

the Wall Street Wamboozle, the Financial Fartstorm. However, knowing historians they will inevitably

call it like The Major Recession of 2008 - 2012. Booooo!

So what caused the Financial Fartstorm that began in late 2008? Well, it was a mixture

of public and private activities that tilted towards short-term economic thinking, speculation

and irresponsible spending. First, there are the Federal Reserve’s policies

of keeping interest rates freakishly low in response to the 2001-2002 recession. Now,

this worked, but the recession ended and interest rates stayed low.

And this, combined with unscrupulous mortgage lenders, encouraged people to buy houses that

they could not afford. In the early 2000s, many millions of Americans,

including certain Crash Course US History hosts, bought real estate assuming that its

value would increase rapidly and forever, so that when you were unable to make payments,

you’d just sell it, pay off the mortgage, and make a tidy profit.

It turns out this was essentially a pyramid scheme and, my friends, I was not at the top

of the pyramid. So back then you could buy a house with a

so-called NINJA loan which sadly this did not involve mutant ninja turtles or pizza.

Ninja stands for No Income, No Job, and No Assets.

Traditionally, people in this situation can’t borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars, but

in the early 2000’s, these loans were giving the benign sounding designation “subprime.”

So it’s important to understand that it wasn’t just like big Wall Street banks financing

huge deals with debt, regular people were doing it - like me.

All this created a classic housing bubble, which was doomed to burst. Also, with the

interest on government Treasury Bills effectively zero, investors had to look elsewhere for

better returns, which led to the idea of issuing securities – these bond-like instruments

that were backed by mortgages. The thinking was that the interest people

paid on their mortgages would supply the underlying value of the security, the way that like tax

revenues are the source of value of a government bond.

Now of course there’d be a minority of people who’d fail to pay off their securitised

mortgages, but most people would pay because, you know, they’d want to keep their houses.

But it turns out that if you haven’t paid any money to own your house, you don’t feel

all that invested in it. Now there are even more reasons why these

securities were terrible ideas, but the important thing is that when the mortgages turned bad,

these securities became toxic assets. Basically, the people who held them suddenly

didn’t know what they were worth if anything and banks overreacted to this uncertainty

as banks like to do by not lending out any money.

And that’s called a credit freeze, which is very bad. So that’s how a housing bubble

turned into a full-fledged financial crisis. Alright Let’s go to the ThoughtBubble.

When banks stop lending, business can’t function. So the stock market collapsed, with

the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropping from above 14,000 to around 8,000 which wiped

out about $7trillion of shareholder wealth. And a majority of Americans had money invested

in the stock market, much of it in the form of retirement funds.

With it being harder to borrow money, Americans finally cut back on their spending, which

resulted in many businesses failing and by the end of 2008, 2.5 million jobs had been

lost, many of which were in manufacturing and construction.

And because those were both male-dominated fields, it led to another change, by mid-2009

more women than men held paying jobs for the first time in American history.

In the last three months of 2008 and the first three months of 2009 our GDP dropped 6%. And

World Trade cratered and that led to unemployment and misery worldwide.

The event that triggered the chaos was the failure of the investment bank Lehman Brothers

in September, just 2 months before the presidential election. The Bush Administration tried to

stop the damage by getting Congress to pass the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP,

which was basically a $700 billion bailout for banks like Citigroup and Bank of America,

insurance companies like AIG and mortgage insurers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Regular individuals also received tarps, but they had to buy them and they weren’t as

cool. Anyway, these bailouts were probably necessary

to stop a complete failure of the financial system but they were very unpopular. Most

of the banks that received a rescue from the taxpayers didn’t help the homeowners facing

foreclosure, and despite receiving millions of federal dollars, AIG continued to pay huge

bonuses to its top executives. Thanks, Thoughtbubble. So, the end of the Bush years looked a lot

like the end of the Hoover years. After a decade of Americans spending more than they

had, government taking a back seat to business interests and deregulation of industries going

hand in hand with increasing corruption, Barack Obama was faced with America’s biggest economic

challenge since the Great Depression. Oh, by the way, we got a new president, Barack

Obama, who 50 years before his election couldn’t have sat in the front of a bus in Alabama.

So I know all the green parts of not-America are mad at us for causing the great financial

meltdown and whatever, and fair enough, but we do make some progress now and again

Barack Obama was young, he was relatively new on the national scene, and represented

change. He appealed to young people and minorities, and he harnessed the power of social media

to communicate with supporters, and get out the vote, and also raise TONS of money.

Also, he was on the cover of US Weekly. You didn’t see Martin Van Buren on the cover

of US Weekly. What’s that? It didn’t exist? Of course it existed!

In 2008 Obama’s election At the time Obama’s election seemed a political watershed and

not just because he was the first African American president. He appeared to break Republicans’

solid hold on the south, he won Virginia, and North Carolina and Florida, and his supporters

represented a coalition of African Americans, and Hispanics, white liberals and, especially,

young people. Oh, it’s time for the mystery document?

I hope it’s from that US Weekly profile. The rules here are simple - he said for the

final time. I’ll tell you one thing that’s going to

change here at Crash Course, no more shock pens. I guess the author of the Mystery Document,

if I’m wrong I get shocked. Alright, let’s see what we got here today.

“For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of our economy calls for

action, bold and swift. And we will act, not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new

foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital

lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We’ll restore science to its rightful place,

and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.

We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.

And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a

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奧巴馬政府。美國曆史速成班 #47 (Obamanation: Crash Course US History #47)

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