by Erin Thompson

Created on: October 22, 2008   Last Updated: October 29, 2008

Whoever wins the presidential race next month is going to find themselves "hamstrung" as a result of the current economic crisis that we are facing in our country, according to National Public Radio (NPR) newscaster Jack Speer. "What we're seeing is an economic destruction that we haven't seen on this scale in my lifetime," Speer said, who spoke in the Pogue Student Center on Oct. 16.The subject of the lecture, which was titled "Election 2008: Is the Economy still the Essential Issue for the Candidates and the Voters?" was changed slightly, "It's not appropriate for me or for NPR to tell you who to vote for," said Speer.

Only weeks before an unprecedented presidential election and in the middle of an unprecedented "economic meltdown," Speer feels that the candidates "are going to inherit an economic mess that's going to take years to clean up."Speer, a 1981 graduate of the communication and media studies department of Edinboro University said that whoever is elected next month will be forced to talk about the economy "with the realization what whatever they say is going to be revised anyway because once they get into office, they're not going to have any choice."Even though candidates have economic platforms, "it is going to be very difficult for whoever is elected to do much of anything" because the country is too settled in debt.When looking back on history, Speer argues that we've "seen this movie before," when it comes to giving money to banks and giving taxpayer dollars to bailout companies and the cause has been building for decades beginning with the 1979 bailout of Chrysler."They got in trouble because they were building big gas-guzzling cars that nobody wanted, the government decided the company was too big to fail," he said.Then in 1988 when the savings and loan institutions across the country collapsed, as well as the $250 billion bailout of AIG Insurance."History is being written nowthese historic events are going to be written about for years to come," said Speer.What really started the chain of events, according to Speer, was precipitated by aggressive lending practices and excessive use of risk, which he says started the Great Depression."There has been a pattern leading up to this that when you look at them in the broad stroke would have given us a clue that this was going to happen."Speer explained that we are experiencing the first nationwide drop in home prices since the Great Depression. "Why didn't we see this coming?" said Speer. "The signs were all there."Speer referred to this as a "Black Swan" event, which is characterized by something that is random or unexpected, but has an extreme impact. The term is based on a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb."I would say that 9-11 was a "Black Swan" event," said Speer.Speer was on campus as part of the Public Relations Student Society of America's distinguished lecture series and is an award-winning newscaster with NPR.

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