Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Obama Bear Market

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was Redirect It's been redirected to the most appropriate place. If, in due time, the phrase takes on a life of its own (like "The Great Depression") it can be revisited. -- Avi (talk) 04:30, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[]

Obama Bear Market[edit]

I am concerned that this phrase is not notable in itself, that it has narrow usage, and that the article actually doesn't explain what the term means (though admittedly it is tagged as under construction). Notability - and the fact that the phrase's existence is only supported by one source - is the main concern, though. ╟─Treasury Tag►contribs─╢ 15:55, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[]

The article is under construction. What's wrong with waiting a few days to see what the article will be like? Grundle2600 (talk) 16:00, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[]

As I have explained, my concerns are that the subject is not notable. Waiting a few days will not prompt several major university essays on the subject - I never suggested that you won't do your best, I just don't believe that notability can be established. But I do stand to be corrected... this AfD will be closed in 5 days' time, and if I am surprised by the improvement, then I won't be too proud to withdraw the nom, pending others' votes. How's that sound? ╟─Treasury Tag►contribs─╢ 16:04, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[]

Yes, if the article doesn't meet the criteria within 5 days, I won't object to it being deleted. Grundle2600 (talk) 16:28, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[]

Delete. There's certainly a few sources that use it, as well as the one in the article there's also this and this. I saved it from speedy for the existence of these sources that certainly gave it context. However I don't think they're anywhere enough to give it notability. Will happily change my vote if more substantial sources are found and I have no prejudice against recreation if the term does become in common use. Dpmuk (talk) 16:08, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[]
- Comment Striking my delete vote and the entirity of the above comment. When originally speedied and then brought to AfD this page appeared to be about the term itself. Now the page has been moved to Bear Market of 2009 and appears to be more about what's happening in the markets than the phrase itself. Currently not sure where I stand on deleltion. Dpmuk (talk) 17:28, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[]

Comment - discussion etc. moved to this page's talkpage. ╟─Treasury Tag►contribs─╢ 16:34, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[]

Redirect - As a plausible search term being used in MSM; since it's already redirected, we're all good. That was easy! :) §FreeRangeFrog 17:46, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[]

Redirect - The Bear Market officially started in July 2008. However, it's a Global crisis. Redirect to "Global financial crisis of 2008–2009"Kgrr (talk) 18:02, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[]

Keep The Bear Market of 2009 is certainly notable, but probably not all President Obama's fault. Add more info and views to article. Redddogg (talk) 18:05, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[]
- Comment - Then the article should be titled Bear Market of 2008 since that's when the bear market was declared. We don't have articles named "The declaration of independence of 1777" do we? If you keep it, it should be clean of NPOV. So far, it's an anti-Obama rant.Kgrr (talk) 18:13, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[]

Merge a brief summary to Global financial crisis of 2008-2009. It's relevant to that article that some media have blamed the continued crisis on Obama's presidency. It's WP:UNDUE to have an entire article about the idea, I think. JulesH (talk) 19:24, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[]

Comment - I clicked on the link to the article at the top of this discussion, and was confused when I ended up at a different article than the one being discussed. As such, I changed Obama Bear Market to redirect to Bear Market of 2009, instead of Global financial crisis of 2008–2009? If the article ends up being deleted, then it would make sense for Obama Bear Market to redirect to Global financial crisis of 2008–2009, but while the article exists, I think the link at the top of this AfD discussion should redirect to it. Calathan (talk) 22:03, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[]

Delete. A clear POV fork, given that there is no new bear market that has started in January. Phil Sandifer (talk) 23:02, 6 March 2009 (UTC)[]
- Comment - It would be a POV fork of "Bear Market of 2008" if such an article existed. There is no separate bear market of 2009, its simply a continuation of the same bear market that started in 2008. The bear market of 2008 was declared in July 2008 when the stocks were already down 20% from its October 2007 high. There has not been a bull market between. It may be notable that Obama is being blamed by some media for the bear market of 2008. Kgrr (talk) 15:59, 7 March 2009 (UTC)[]

Speedy Delete - Absurd premise; the market dropped 89% under Hoover. Does that mean it was four bear markets in a row? No, it was one really bad one. The 46.5% the market fell under George W. Bush, from 14,000 to 7552 in November, wasn't two bear markets. Individual legs down are not each their own bear market any more than individual snowstorms are each their own winter, nor is a winter split into the portion before and the portion after the New Year. Years are what they are and winters, in the Northern Hemisphere, straddle two of them. And the year doesn't cause the season, it's more like the other way around. A bear market ends only when there is sustained growth, not just some dead cat bounce or bear market rally. I began my experience of this editor assuming good faith, but I keep running into him; he has more than a complete failure to grasp economic fundamentals, he has a history of willfully prejudiced vandalism. For those suggesting a merge, consider the citations here. The same people quoted in the Bloomberg article as attributing this bear market to Obama work on Wall Street and sold the very credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations that got us into this mess, along with the overbought stocks of the companies that created, sold and insured them. Clearly these people were either guilty of ignorance about these instruments and the risk they carried, given their AAA ratings, or they are guilty of more than that, in that they suspected but vouched for them anyway. In the past several months they have been contributing to the vicious cycle by short selling the hardest-hit stocks, and jumping on any company with bad news. What this means is that they are betting on the market to go down and actually make money when it does. With that kind of a bet, they have no vested interest in seeing Obama cause market rallies in the near term. They know there will be more money to be made destroying companies than in waiting for any to be massively profitable again, and they want to deflect any attention or blame away from themselves for as long as possible, by blaming mortgage holders and politicians and CEOs and making whatever they can before they, too, are unemployed. Take my assessment of them as you like, but let's not pretend it's some objective sage with no self-interest and a broad view worthy of quoting in an encyclopedia on such a weighty issue.

If this quote: "I began my experience of this editor assuming good faith, but I keep running into him; he has more than a complete failure to grasp economic fundamentals, he has a history of willfully prejudiced vandalism." is about Pgreenfinch, I am in complete agreement. He is trolling the Financial crisis of 2007-2009 article as well. And he's also spammed my personal talk page with nonsense. --Nihilozero (talk) 12:26, 8 March 2009 (UTC)[]

A bit late for the recurrent ad hominem by Nihilozero. Anyway, guess who was the troller that brought a policized section in the said article ;-)) --Pgreenfinch (talk) 13:16, 8 March 2009 (UTC)[]

The article's second-longest quote is from an asset manager who says, “People thought there would be a brief Obama rally, and that hasn’t happened. It speaks to the carnage that’s in the economy and the lack of confidence in the measures that have been announced.” If they only expected a "brief Obama rally", that means they knew this emotion-driven rally would have been followed by a continuation of the downturn. But does the manager blame Obama? No, he blames the "carnage that's in the economy," which is obviously a continuance of October and November 2008, and "the lack of confidence in the measures that have been announced." Why the lack of confidence? Well, we were led by Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke and George W. Bush to believe their measures would be adequate to prevent this from happening, and they were wrong, so what could that same amount once again possibly be enough to accomplish now that we've gone down another 20%? And they told us it would be used to buy and insure troubled assets but they changed their mind and bought preferred stock instead; those troubled assets remain, and the stock is worth quite a bit less at the moment (though someday it will go back up if the market and the bad press doesn't destroy the companies first).

The article's longest quote is from another asset manager who says, “Prospects for recovery in the financial sector, despite all the government help, still seem rather remote. We’ve had a weak economy for a couple of years, and we aren’t seeing the stimulus working at this point. That is what weighs on investors’ minds.” Again, it doesn't sound like he's blaming Obama, he's acknowledging the economy has been heading south for a couple of years, and he points out that the stimulus isn't seen to be working. Bear in mind, no pun intended, that the perception of the stimulus he's talking about is based on the Bush one that's already been tried; Obama's hasn't even gone out yet.

In a section entitled "Blaming the Barack Obama administration," the Wiki article in question says a September '08 editorial in the Wall Street Journal "had predicted that an Obama presidency would be very damaging to the economy". What the article doesn't indicate is that this editorial was co-written by Phil Gramm, the former Republican senator from Texas during the governorship of George W. Bush, who had served in John McCain's campaign as his economic adviser. He's the one who stated, "You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession...We have sort of become a nation of whiners, you just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline." McCain denounced this statement and Gramm was persuaded to resign from McCain's campaign. Here, he was obviously trying to scare swing voters into fearing Obama and voting for McCain. Where does the editor of an encyclopedia get off citing partisan editorial "predictions" from disgraced campaign staff? What Gramm was trying to scare the reader about in that editorial was not that the mere fact of Obama taking office would be bad for the market, but that his policies would have an effect contrary to Gramm's ideology. So, considering that Obama's policies have not yet been implemented, much less caused an effect, any drop in the market at this point is merely the result of such fear-mongering and disparagement of Obama's future policies. If this were not so, Gramm's blatantly partisan opinion piece, which extolls the virtues of John McCain, and which precedes Obama's inauguration by more than four months, would not be the cited examination of the drop in the stock market which coincided with the first two months of Obama's tenure.

Another of the Journal stories cited was written by George H.W. Bush's chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. While he should know his economics, we should know his political affiliation, but the Wiki article doesn't mention this. It sadly goes to follow even in the mouth of this Depression that Republicans would instinctively and ideologically malign a Democratic president's plans instead of accepting they lost the White House and trying to be constructively critical in cobbling together a better Democratic plan? Me, I want Obama's economic recovery plans to succeed every bit as much as I wanted Bush's economic recovery actions to succeed. It isn't about the party or the ideology and it isn't about flippancy and finger-pointing, it's about understanding how the severity of a real and sustained recession or depression will affect the rest of us for years and years to come if people don't have jobs and homes and investments and we aren't on the slow but steady road to recovery by the early part of next year.

Here's the most egregious misrepresentation of an article. Either the editor's motives or his intellect are suspect when he cites NPR of all places for this quote by Jim Cramer: "This is the greatest wealth destruction I've seen by a president". Why do I have a problem with this? The article denounces Cramer's quote as a "juvenile rant". The subtitle to the article is, "The idea of blaming one person for the downfall of the economy with a gross domestic product of about $14 trillion, powered by 300 million people and engaged in complex global commerce is nuts." Everything Grundle2600 writes in the Wiki article is denounced in the NPR article, including one of his Wall Street Journal citations. It counters Grundles observation that the market dropped 20% under Obama with the fact that it dropped 46.5% under Bush. Yet Grundle2600 is uninterested in presenting this in his Wiki article? For that matter, how does Cramer not remember this 46.5% drop under Bush only left off a few months ago? There's videotape of him covering it day by woeful day on his show, as he recommends stock after stock that winds up tanking. Just because a Jim Cramer or a Phil Gramm makes a statement doesn't mean it's encyclopedic. And when it's shown to be incompatible with the facts, any encyclopedic usage should be to show that incompatibility, not propping up the disproven claim. The author calls the whole premise upon which Grundle2600 has built this article "infantilism". I would call it premeditated infanticide, as in killing the newborn to prevent any possibility he'll bring positive change, to prevent bipartisanship and working together for real solutions instead of sensationalizing negativity and passing around blame before anything even gets a chance to prove itself one way or the other. Obama wasn't my first choice, but he's the only President we've got for the next four years. If his policies end up failing, there are other things we can try. And then we can start to source a balanced view of what has happened. In the meantime, he has a mandate to try what the people voted him in to do, and we aren't here to presage doom.

As Kgrr states immediately above, "It may be notable that Obama is being blamed by some media for the bear market of 2008," but as he is aware, that's an entirely different point than the one made in this article, or its former or current title. Indeed this attempt to rewrite history and thwart a recovery is worthy of a mention, and so are the partisan affiliations and self-interest of those shameless enough to try it.

As for the article as it was conceived and as it stands, this sort of agenda-driven disingenuousness before anything has really happened, designed for no reason other than to perpetuate malaise and discontent and despair, doesn't belong in any encyclopedia article. Wikipedia articles are not the platform for such misanthropy.Abrazame (talk) 16:24, 7 March 2009 (UTC)[]

Comment - would it be possible to have a precis of all that? TLDR etc. Sorry! ╟─Treasury Tag►contribs─╢ 17:52, 7 March 2009 (UTC)[]

Responding in part to Abrazame (above): Short and simple: This article is a POV-fork and a (misleading) joke.

Parts of the article could be merged/included in existing ones. Therefore:

Delete. I usually try not to comment on editors but I'll do so in this case. Grundle is really good in finding information (and I might ask him/her these days to find some "desperate" needed hard to find info for another article) but his/her edits fit usually more in news and editorials and not in an encyclopedic article (at least when it comes to politics). And finally: Opinions only don't make an article.--The Magnificent Clean-keeper (talk) 18:45, 7 March 2009 (UTC)[]

I have added more sources that cite the phrase "Obama bear market," including a financial expert who says the phrase is being used by investors. Also, the phrase "Obama bear market" now has 12,000 hits at google. Grundle2600 (talk) 02:13, 8 March 2009 (UTC)[]

Merge / Rename. The significant phenomenon is that the Dow has been cut in half since October 2007. So one might want to call the article US bear market of 2007-2009, incorporating both Bear Market of 2008 and Obama Bear Market. Of course that period is coextensive with the subprime crisis and global financial crisis, but I think a 50% fall in the world's major stock index is a sufficiently noteworthy aspect of the overall event to warrant an article of its own. Mporter (talk) 07:32, 8 March 2009 (UTC)[]

Redirect It should be redirected to one of the global crisis pages, which already have enough POV blaming Dlazzaro (talk) 07:45, 8 March 2009 (UTC)[]

Delete Fed up with the weird and stereotyped politization in those various "crisis" articles, like is happening also in the Financial crisis one. --Pgreenfinch (talk) 09:38, 8 March 2009 (UTC)[]

No doubt I acted out of line in doing so, but I have made the merge/redirect I recommended. Both Obama Bear Market and Bear Market of 2008 now point to US bear market of 2007-2009, which contains almost everything from both articles. Mporter (talk) 09:57, 8 March 2009 (UTC)[]

I like the merged article. Grundle2600 (talk) 13:28, 8 March 2009 (UTC)[]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.