The Horizon of Deepwater (a prose gusher)

In the fall of 2008, the Treasurer of the United States, Henry Paulson, convinced the President and the Congress to bail out the financial industry so that the whole damn system of passing money and electrons around would not fall apart.
So Mr. Bush, with legislative help from the Reps and the Senators, injected seven or eight hundred billion of public money into the big banks and the big crap-shooting insurer that backed up those banks, along with the two huge quasi-public mortgage underwriters. At least that's the way this taxpayer remembers it. Help me out here if my facts are a little amiss.
At the time, those powers that be had convinced us, in the frenzied imminent panic of falling markets and a deflating housing industry, that the entire structure of the way we do business in America and even beyond America would fall apart at the seams if we didn't meet Mr. Paulson's recommendations.
Of course we'll never know if that universal implosion of American business and international commerce would have happened or not. The banks got their money, and we are still in a big mess, although not a catostrophic one as big as it might have otherwise been haha. We'll never know. Instead of the sky falling on us with incalculable damage, we have been able to creep through a couple of lean years in which the ever-present spectre hound of the double-dip has been constantly at our heels, baying for blood or possibly just for red ink, which looks like blood. These days, who knows the difference between any real thing and its hyped-up digitized alter-ego.
Now we've come full circle, and have got the same situation over again, except this time its not Hank having fits, but the chicken-littles who warn us of that debt ceiling bogey beast that will devour our already-suspect financial stability and digest it, and then egest our fiscal credibility with overly-copious liquidity in turds not easily disposed of.

A little greece carefully applied will move things along nicely.

Meanwhile, the ratings agencies, the Moody, S&P and the Fitch, are making their obligatory noises of warning, walking their own wire of credibility while keeping fingers in the air to see which way the wind will blow.
Where were those rating agencies in 2008? What were they doing when they should have been sounding the alarms about derivatives and CDS and MBS and CDOs? Same as what they're doing now--waiting to see which way the wind will blow to tip or not tip over our unwieldy bowl of cards, 2011 version.
So now, if those stubborn, ole fashion Repubs in Congress relent and allow the Dems and themselves to keep flushing paper and electronic dollars while running both the deficit and the debt ceiling into deepwater default--what will happen then, huh?
We'll never know. When they've made their deal and then the Fed and Treasury have a new batch of paper and electrons to swish around in the bowl of toil, we'll never know what torrent of troublesome irresponsibility has been flushed down into that great poseidon-adventure pipeline that dumps its dootee out who knows where, the ocean or somewhere, probably some unstoppable severed pipeline a hundred miles off the gulf coast. We'll never know. But at least we'll still have money to play with, just like in 2008, and we can stay in the game with the blessings of the bondholders. Flush on!

Glass Chimera

King Nevuhhadnuttin's dream

King Nevuhhadnuttin had a bad dream and he was trying to figure out the meaning of it but he couldn't and so he called in the wise satraps and the council of advisers; then seemingly out of nowhere, but actually it was from the jailhouse, this wise woman Danielle steps forward and with mucho aplomb poses this mysterious enigma wrapped in a question:
"The other side? The other side of what?"
And King Nevuhnadnuttin exclaims: "That's it! That's exactly what I''m wondering, and what I'm frantically asking, in my dream just before I wake up."
And Danielle calmly continues, "Precisely, O King, and allow me to describe your dream, for I have discerned it and I can interpret the meaning thereof."
"Go for it!"says he. "Knock yourself out."
Then saith Danielle: "We're careening down a slippery road; the brakes are failing; further down the slope ahead of us in the frozen darkness is a precipice and we're going to slide right off it into sheer unsupported air. Here's one guy speaking urgently from the back seat pleading the driver to stop spending money because if we don't we'll slide right off the edge and plummet to insolvency and fiscal ruination that will lead to societal disintegration and national chaos.
"But over here in the passenger seat is another guy warning with controlled alarm in his voice that we've got to keep the money flowing and make it possible for most everyone to keep spending dollars and the only real danger is we have not yet thrown enough money at the problem and if we cut off the Fed supply the fall from the precipice will be very bad and our recovery will be long and protracted at best.
"So the driver--and I'm talking about not only you, O King, but your entire realm and every person in it (how's that for high stakes pressure, huh?)--is worriedly weighing these two opposite warnings, and trying desperately to apply the brakes but finds it impossible while the passenger says just let the thing go because if we build up enough downhill momentum--not to worry--we'll launch beyond the precipice fast enough and far enough to land on some terra firma which is surely on the other side.
"'The other side? The other side of what?'"
"The other side of the balanced-budget misconception," saith Danielle. "You see, according to the prevailing Keynesian wisdom, balanced budgets are an obsolete notion that no longer have any real meaning. They're just relics from the past--holdovers from ages long gone, like the age of gold, when monetary value was tied to gold, and the age of silver when we were using silver certificates for currency, and the age of bronze when all our value was linked to industrial production, and the age of iron when times started to get hard, and now the age of iron mixed with clay when everything falls apart."
"Falls apart?"
"O, not really, O King. I was just kidding. We'll be okay. Have you thought about declaring a jubilee?"
"A what?"
"A jubilee. Free all the debtors from their debts, and let every person and family just take ownership of his/her/their domicile and vehicle."
"Say what?"
"Just kidding, O King, it would never work, too disruptive and unorthodox--definitely not a workable strategy."
"Right, Danielle. That would be a...uh...can of virtual worms. Now who's dreaming?"
"Me, I guess. I have a dream too."

Carey Rowland, author of Glass half-Full