Half full or half empty? Sorry, no, there is no glass

April 18th, 2009 at 04:25pm Annette LaCross

Call me a pessimist. (Everyone else does.)

But I just can’t bring myself to feel exactly bullish about the news from last week, when euphoria gripped the country as stocks ticked upward and interest rates ticked downward.

It was a great week for the Obama administration, which took advantage of near-record-low mortgage rates to tell every American homeowner to refinance their home loans.

“We are at a time where people can really take advantage of this,” President Barack Obama said last week.

It made my hair stand on end.

Granted, I tend to be a little gun shy. But I’m a big believer in the “fool me once” philosophy.

And Obama’s remarks sounded an awful lot like former President George W. Bush’s throughout the early — and increasingly euphoric — days of the decade.

Back then, of course, the prevailing wisdom was that everyone needed to own a house. In 2002, Bush announced an aggressive program to provide down payment assistance, increase the supply of affordable homes, increase support for self-help homeownership programs and simplify the buying process.

He also told the real estate and mortgage-finance industries (back when we had them) to increase the number of minority homeowners.

“Five-and-a-half million families by 2010 will own a home,” he said triumphantly at the time. “That is our goal. It is a realistic goal.”

Was it ever. Briefly, at least.

Ever since, I’ve been fairly bearish about declarations from my federal government. For sure, it’s a great time to refinance. Of course, in 2002 (and in the five years after), it was a great time to buy a house.

So a few glimmers of possible improvement here and there are hardly enough to convince me that a global economy mired in a recession for more than a year is finally “starting to level off,” as The Associated Press proclaimed happily last week.

Especially when I hear something like this:

“The sense of a ball falling off a table, which is what the economy has felt like since the middle of last fall … we can be reasonably confident that that is going to end within the next few months and we will no longer have that sense of a free-fall.”

That’s Lawrence Summers, one of Obama’s top economic advisers.

So much for euphoria.

Contact Business Editor Annette LaCross at alacross@rrstar.com or 815-987-1295.

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