President Obama talks in this clip about the meeting he had this weeks with billionaire investor Warren Buffet. Obama said he received a warning from the financial guru, who told him the U.S. has still ‘long way to go’ and is only 40 to 50 percent recovered from its wrenching recession.
“I’ll tell you exactly what Warren Buffett said. He said, we went through a wrenching recession, and so we have not fully recovered. We’re about 40, 50% back. But we’ve still got a long way to go. And the reason people haven’t fully invested yet, and started creating as many jobs as we would like, is because it takes some time to come back.
He used a good example in the housing market, where about 1.2 million households are formed to buy a house each year. That’s been the historic trend. But we went through a span of time, four or five years, because of the bubble and sub-prime lending and all the shenanigans that were going on with the mortgage market, when we were building two million homes a year. Now we’re building 500-thousand, and what Warren pointed out was, look, we’re going to get back to 1.2, but right now we’re soaking up a whole bunch of inventory.
So, a lot of the challenge is to work our way through this recession, try to accelerate, not only profits, because companies now are making money primarily because they’ve cut costs, but also to see the opportunities out there…..There are enormous opportunities for the future. We just have to seize them.”
