Follow along with this Salmon post:
Megan McCardle thinks this shows a “giant disconnect” between Wall Street and Washington —
Maybe the Obama administration should have hired some Wall Street insiders. That would have solved everything.
This is more my point:
When Bob Rubin did a nifty sidestep around Congress and magicked Mexico’s bailout billions from some dusty account no one knew about, he was playing a dangerous game. When Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke stretched the limits of their powers almost beyond the legal breaking point during the financial crisis, their actions were understandable but also set yet another precedent. And so now, when there’s no immediate emergency at all, people are looking to the executive branch to find a way to do the right thing, and thereby giving Congress implicit permission to play out and generally behave with all the maturity of a group of rampaging destructive adolescents.
The nation is in crisis mode right now... but there is no crisis.
Or rather there is -- unemployment. And that could be ended almost immediately.
Anyway. This sounds hysterical, but, well, hysteria has been normalized:
The base-case scenario is, still, that the debt ceiling will be raised, somehow. But already an enormous amount of damage has been done: the US Congress has demonstrated clearly that it can’t be trusted to govern the country in a responsible manner. And the tail-risk implications for markets are huge. Think of the speed with which the Egyptian government collapsed earlier this year, or the incredible downward velocity of News Corporation right now. When you build up large stocks of mistrust and ill will, nothing can happen for a very long time. But when something does happen, it’s much quicker and much worse than anybody could have anticipated. The markets might not be punishing the US government at the moment. But the mistrust and ill will is there, believe me. And when it appears, it will appear with a vengeance.
The GOP has nakedly declared itself an ideological formation. It is not a political party: it's something else.
I guess the answer is to offer young Americans a choice beween nothing or debt.
Or else fucking not.
Suppose we were to say, as a nation, UNLEASH! ACCOMPLISH! Instead of "Pay that shit back."
Well, we'd maybe be America...
The GI Bill did wonders for overall American prosperity. WTF is the message now? "Sorry, we could all get nice houses in Levittown, were it not for the absence of Hitler?"