It is a standard operating procedure for republicans after they fuck up to get philosophical and start talking about overall trends in the economy and generally

It is a standard operating procedure for republicans after they fuck up to get philosophical and start talking about overall trends in the economy and generally treat the whole economy like some kind of force of nature that ebbs and flows on its own and that we cannot do anything about. While there is an economic cycle its effects can be rather mild if properly managed. The fact of the matter is that the dismal performance of the stock market in the last 10 years just matches the dismal performance of the overall economy in the last 10 years and is simply the result of terrible leadership. Yes, it is mostly the fault of George Bush, and Alan Greenspan and Bernake and the new brand of "conservatism" that got popular in America in the later Clinton years (and that includes a lot of conservative democrats). I put conservatism in quotes because this is a type of conservatism that is foreign to many actual honest conservatives. I do not have the time to list all the fuckups, but let me just list the important ones: rampant financial deregulation while still ensuring that the government will guarantee the banks, incredibly expensive wars all over the world without honestly taking the expense into account, a policy ensuring high oil prices for a country that is the greatest importer of oil in the world, trying to fix the effects of wars and high gas prices with low interest rates, when any economist will tell you that these are not things you can fix with low interest rates, support of outsourcing and all kinds of policies that destroy the earning potential of the middle class, refusal to invest in infrastructure, etc. etc. So the stock market is doing badly because the economic policies we had in the last 10 years failed. That is pretty much it.