Obama Boasts in Britain: I Saved the World Economy as President

President Obama told Britons today that one of the things he'll most appreciate about his legacy is saving the world economy. 

Asked at a townhall in London to identify what he's most proud of, Obama said:

It's interesting, when you're in the job, you're not thinking on a day-to-day basis about your legacy, you're thinking how do I get done what I'm trying to get done right now. And I don't think that I'll have a good sense of my legacy until 10 years from now, when I can look back with some perspective and get a sense of what worked and what didn't. There are some things I'm proud of.  The basic principle that in a country as wealthy as the United States, every person should have access to high quality health care that they can afford. That's something that I'm proud of, that I believe in. 

Saving the world economy from a Great Depression — that was pretty good.

You know, the first time I came to London, the first time I came to London was April of 2009, the world economy was in a freefall. In part because of the reckless behavior of folks on Wall St. But in part because of reckless behavior of a lot of financial institutions around the world. 

For us to be able to mobilize the world’s community, to take rapid action, to stabilize the financial markets, and then in the United States to pass Wall Street reforms that make it much less likely that a crisis like that can happen again, I’m proud of that. 

I think on the international stage, the work that we did to get the possible nuclear weapons that Iran was developing out of Iran, and doing so without going to war, is something that I'm very proud of. There are things that people don't pay attention to now. But, the response to the Ebola crisis. For about three weeks, everybody was sure that everybody was going to die. 'We're all going to get Ebola, we're all going to die.' And there was sort of hysteria about it. And then everybody forgot about it. And the reason everybody forgot about was because we mounted one of, if not the most effective public health responses in the history of the world, and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. So ... I don't know, I'll look at a scorecard at the end.