The precipitating factor that got our nation, and by enlarge the world economy, into this pit was the greed of a small percentage of mortgage financiers who engaged in risky lending and others like those at AIG who were involved in the credit default swap racket insuring and bundling these toxic assets and bad loans.

What enabled all this?? Radical deregulation of the financial sector under the watch of the Bush administration mostly. As hard as it is for Libertarians and radical free-marketers to hear and accept, when you let big business make the rules and “self-regulate” greed takes over and the bubble may inflate for a while. However, as we have learned the hard way as a nation, it WILL burst, like it has, and when it does the fall has the risk of cascading collapses throughout the economy.

Obama, in his first 65 days in office, has dealt effectively with the financial crisis, by enacting much-needed stimulus and relief to stem the bleeding- nearly 4 million hard-working Americans lost their jobs last year. He has proposed comprehensive health care reform that will dramatically reduce waste and cost; he has proposed centrist education reform policy that will hold students, teachers, and parents accountable for achievement results, and link funding and compensation to not only need but also results.

He has also proposed comprehensive clean energy reform that is long overdue that we desperately need to break our dependence on foreign oil. His administration is accomplishing all this within the first 100 days while also dealing with a major global financial crisis inherited from his predecessor that is unparalleled in scope at least since the 1930s.

In addition, Hoover’s downfall was largely that he CUT spending rather than making sound investment in STIMULATING the already reeling U.S. economy resulting in millions more losing jobs and an already rigidly locked, ailing economy to decline further and faster.

This is, in every way, the exact opposite of Obama’s approach. It is disingenuous, however, to try and pin the fact that we have probably not reached the bottom yet on Obama. An economic catastrophe like this is not caused overnight, and also cannot be corrected overnight.

A lot of the toxic assets, bad loans and other dubious investments are just beginning to come due- estimates are that there may be even more mortgage defaults next year when a whole other wave of risky adjustable rate mortgages increase in rate as scheduled, before the economy and housing markets begin to rally substantively again in 2010.

There are already signs of hope from Wall Street as well- almost immediately after Treasury Secretary Geithner announced the fiscal recovery plan recently, there was a soaring rally in the Dow and the market finished dramatically up for that day for the first time in a good while.

Get out of here with the garbage of trying to compare Obama to Hoover. That is the biggest bunch of malarkey I have heard in quite some time.