October 9, 2013, Fed Up
So the suspense is over... it's monetary bid'ness as usual, as the President nominates Federal Reserve Vice-Chair[wo]man, [Brooklyn-born-and-bred] Janet Yellen to be the next most important person on Earth Federal Reserve Chair[wo]man.
If you think Bernanke had a tough time improvising some way through the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent prolonged depression "Great Recession," Ms. Yellen will promptly have to deal with even bigger "too big to fail" banks, even more debt and derivatives everywhere, the ongoing playground urinating contest government shut down and the granddaddy of them all... the ultimate own-goal... the potential American default, now slated for around October 17th (although, ironically, not paying nearly a million federal workers because of "the shutdown" will have the bizarrely salutary effect of improving the Government's cash flow, so it may get an extra week or two before having to miss any legally required payments.)
Not to worry-- the answer to these, and all other woes, will be the magic bullet (yes, that's the term... "silver bullets" only either kill werewolves or contain Coors Light) known as creating currency through purchase of ever more dodgy debt "Quantitative Easing," and Ms. Yellen is not only with the program, she will "un-taper" and probably buy even more crap each month than Greenspan Bernanke did, and ultimately, stick the bill to the taxpayers (a declining number of people as full-time jobs fade away, and this trend will accelerate, in part, due to increased hiring costs caused by... Obamacare.)
The current fiasco of Republicans purporting to hold the nation hostage was set in motion by one Barack Obama... when he sold us out back in 2010 with the Bush tax cut extension (and I thought he was just doing what his backers wanted). I thought things were bad when I noted that extending the Bush tax cuts-- which would, and did, add trillions in cumulative deficit, without a concomitant increase in the debt ceiling was political malpractice. But "bad" was understating. Obama's extension of the Bush tax cuts in exchange for nothing was as gross an act of political malpractice as has ever been committed, and may, because this President has shown Republicans that he will always cave when push comes to shove, actually result in a calamitous "default" situation (which, btw, could be disastrous even absent an actual default if the interest the U.S. government has to pay on bond interest goes up significantly as a result of the perceived risk)... and it's entirely Obama's fault.
I can't say that enough times. And his present position-- holding the line that Newt Gingrich's Mitt Romney's health care plan is so sacrosanct that all else must be sacrificed to it--. is just stupid. Don't get me wrong-- the Republicans (to the extent you believe that all of this isn't just some giant kabuki to benefit financial interests who have placed huge bets on the chaos and that they are actually different from "the Democrats") are plenty stupid too.
And so there we have it-- two groups of stupid people (or one group, if you like) having a gigantic schoolyard "hold your breath" contest... Good luck to the rest of us. Because while I can't predict a "winner," I can sure as hell tell you who is going to lose.