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  1. Economy and Politics
  2. Economy

Buffett: The economy needs Viagra

Published: Jul 09, 2009 2 min read

On Thursday morning, Warren Buffett said that a second stimulus package to help the economy might be called for. I'm not going to go into all the pros and cons of a second stimulus (you can read all about that here). But the metaphor that he used to break down the idea on Good Morning America was a little...how should we say it...odd. Buffett said, "Our first stimulus bill, it seemed to me, was sort of like taking half a tablet of Viagra and having also a bunch of candy mixed in as everybody was putting it into their own constituencies. It doesn’t have quite the wallop." (Credit to The Wall Street Journal's MarketBeat blog for picking this up.)

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Buffett can't be blamed for struggling to put the stimulus into terms that the reporter and average Americans can understand. In fact, since the economic crisis started, there have been a few famous occasions where politicians tripped over themselves when trying to explain what was going on.

In addition to Buffett's Viagra analogy, President Obama has fumbled over the definition of price/earnings ratios (fast-forward to about 1:50 into this clip):

And Treasury Secretary Geithner dumbed down his response to questions about the safety of the U.S. dollar and Treasury investments so much, that his audience of Chinese students broke out laughing:

I don't envy these guys. Trying to boil down an extremely complicated situation into a TV news bite is impossible. But I wonder what the Cialis folks think about Viagra getting all the attention?