Okay, so think about this:

There are analysts whose job it is to watch these companies and make investment recommendations -- most of them didn't see this coming, at least as badly as it turned out.

There are pretty smart investors who put money in these companies -- most of them didn't see this coming.

There are journalists for financial reporting whose job it is to do nothing all day but investigate and write about these companies -- most of them didn't see it coming.

There are government regulators who are supposed to watch for this sort of thing -- most of them didn't see it coming.

Why? Because the companies were hiding how bad things were getting and doing a pretty good job of it. But you want to fixate on blaming the President for not seeing the problem that most people whose job it is to watch this one particular thing missed it?

And no, the President's job is not to know everything about everything. His job is to have people gather information, brief him, make recommendations and then he makes a decision ... that's the role of a Chief Executive: decision-making. The CEO of a company does not have all information about all divisions of his company in his head at all times -- especially if the department heads are deliberately misleading him.

Even if he had seen the problem coming, there's little he could have done about it. In order to have headed this thing off, regulations would have to have been put in place -- those regulations would have been to make companies stop making loans that couldn't be paid back. That would not have been a very popular bit of legislation and it's unlikely he would have been able to push it through Congress. I can see the New York Times headlines now: "Bush Denies Homeownership to Millions of Poor".

There's a common misconception that the President has some mystical power over the economy -- this simply isn't the case. Sure there's some influence, but timing and market forces are not that controllable. This issue isn't "Bush's fault" any more than the dotCom boom was a credit to Clinton -- they both just happened to be President when these things occurred. There's plenty of blame to go around for this (http://www.bdsmlibrary.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=17564), but I don't see what Bush could reasonably have been expected to do.

If you want to play the "he should have known"-game, then point at the consumers who took the mort-gages (silly spam filter) in the first place. They "should have known" that when their payment adjusted up they wouldn't be able to afford it.

Now, if you do want a President who was prescient enough to be one of the few to recognize this problem was coming and how bad it is, you're in luck. There are two candidates in this year's Presidential race:

One candidate recognized this problem was coming in 2005 and warned that the books were being cooked and it would have disastrous consequences. He stated this on the record in Congress and supported legislation to fix the problem.

The other candidate has two economic advisers who were part of getting Fannie-Mae/Freddie-Mac into this position, one of whom received $90-million in compensation while screwing the company up. This candidate has received more money from that industry than any other politician other than the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.