Obama's Ascendancy and Fall

Along the way I have had a rather interesting dialogue with a colleague of mine that I have the utmost respect for.
Not only is he one of the very best traders I have ever worked with and one of the funniest persons; but he is someone that has a love for the culinary arts like myself, fully interactive in any environment, and with every sort of company. One of his contentions and a consistent one to boot, was that Obama would be a one term President, a viewpoint I have not been able to embrace until recently

He has always ascertained for any number of reasons that Obama would be one term. Recent events that have had very little main media profile has me seriously doubting my opposition to my colleagues contention.

The first aspect deals with the Presidents assertion that Pakistan/Afghanistan would be the focus of the war on terror. His approach is philosophically and fundamentally no different to that of Dubya, just different geographically.

In his attempt to unearth Osama Bin Laden and his Taliban supporters, he has created a source of future enmity and hatred for the USA. The result of his actions is that there are anything between 2.5 and 3 million displaced persons now living in refugee camps in the Afghan/Pakistan borders. This is a direct result of the action of the new Commander-in-Chief. People are dying and displaced, the camps lack water and appropriate facilities, and the only thing that they know is that their current situation and circumstance is a direct result of US policy as ordered by Barack Obama.

Additionally while his recent speech in Cairo was a landmark one in many respects and reached out to the Muslim world, some may see it as cynical picking Hosni Mubarak as host, when one considers the record of the Egyptian leader.

What's even worse is that as part of the financial services industry I watch in astonishment as a bit of a double play occurs, on the one hand harsh rhetoric and the appointment of a czar to oversee executive pay even as the majority of the banks are allowed to borrow from Peter to pay Paul. In this instance I refer to the fact that many of the banks (and read Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley as banks now) happily feeding at the FDIC guarantee trough to borrow cheaply and pay back TARP Funds. Nice arbitrage especially when these institutions are only paying back a portion of what they actually owe; but it allows them a way out from under the heel of the administration re executive compensation and the like.

While I continue to believe in Obama to a greater extent than not, I am increasingly of the opinion that what has always been a plan that sits on a knife edge, will end up falling apart, especially with a likely second leg down in the economy as unemployment picks up and the federal deficit continues to grow at an astounding pace.