From Bill Clinton's remarks at a fundraiser last night for President Obama:
If you go back 500 years, whenever a country's financial system collapses, it takes between 5 and 10 years to get back to full employment. If you go back for the last 200 years, when buildings had been widely owned by individuals and companies, if there's a mortgage collapse it almost always takes 10 years.
The ten-year time frame is particularly convenient because it gets the Democrats past a second Obama term and into a term for Hillary Clinton or Andrew Cuomo or Deval Patrick or whoever else comes along. If the economy isn't going well then, expect Clinton, if he is still around, to change the story to 13 years, or 15 years, or however many years it takes to get past the next election. This "it almost always takes 10 years" message is certainly not what Obama was saying during the 2008 presidential campaign, or what his economic advisers were saying as they sold the stimulus.
