It wasn't Obama that walked into the mess.
Honestly you guys are so distorted by your politics that I'm surprised you don't count sunspots as presidential accomplishments. The mess as you refer to it engulfed the entire world economy and transcended at least five previous administration's.
The 2008 crash was 20 times the size of the US economy. It is not possible for one man, one POTUS, or even a dozen POTUS people to be either responsible for it .... or responsible for even beginning to fix it. That would be tantamount to the ant on the train track winning his battle with the train. This kind of economics dwarfs local politics.
Jo
While I gave you a 'win' response, I do disagree with this one point; Obama did save the US economy by applying a huge amount of money that did not come from the US budget to fix the critical problem; US Big Banks had to be recapitalized so they could function again.
Obama did that with QE to Infinity.
He assured the banks he would buy all those subprime equities/derivatives off them despite them having no market value, and thereby recapitalize a credit system that had frozen due to technicalities. Our financial system had fallen into what I call a 'Mark to Market Trap' in that they had equities and derivatives that were making money for them, but because the instruments used to calculate their value were no longer trusted, these money making instruments were technically worthless because no one could legally buy them that normally buy such financial objects because of in-house rules that prohibit buying anything that has no mark-to-market value. Once you try to sell an equity on the market, its value in your accountant ledger is technically ZERO. So to keep from going into a fractional reserve lending collapse due to inadequate capitalization ratio to credit already lent out, the Big Banks had to keep billions of USD in money making derivatives off the market so they could continue pricing them at the price they paid for them instead of what they could actually get from selling them. This gave the banks enough time for Obama to yank their wang from the meat grinder.
I give Obama well deserved credit for this. Not only did he understand the problem for what it was, something W couldnt do, he also figured out a way of recapitalizing the banks without hitting the US budget. We got it essentially for free by leveraging the USD as the world reserve currency. Essentially Obama had the rest of the world pay off our Big Banks debts.
Now I know that a whole lot of people playing the markets didnt like QE and there were aspects of it I still do not like, but it WORKED. Our financial system, and thus our entire economy, owes Obama a huge debt for saving it from a mark-to-market collapse.