DOOM! cometh to the spendthrift like a flame to the wick of a lamp....

Good riddance to the Build America Bonds (BABs). I concur. BABs were mainly a badly-hidden bailout of the states (one of many to come, I'm afraid.)

I've often thought that many people (and not just liberals by any means) think of money as magical tickets that can simply be fabricated and spent at will. The modern age of fiat currency has convinced everyone that we have indeed found the magical hole in the sky that creates cash ex nihilo, no questions asked. Our President certainly thinks this way. So does the erstwhile head of the Federal Reserve and his counterpart over at the US Treasury. These people are not alarmed about the mind-boggling debt-load we are carrying because to them, it's not actually real. It's just some made-up number that has no impact on the world of real things. (The fact that most Americans are functionally innumerate doesn't help.)

The next time someone tells you that inflation is low, show them this story and tell them they're full of it. There's a reason that the Fed is careful to ignore commodity prices when they calculate the rate of inflation.

The dread beast of default draws ever closer to Greece, Ireland, and Portugal.

You know that "temporary" weakness in the USD? Well, that weakness might not be so "temporary". (In what I am sure is completely unrelated news, Gold hit a new high of $1512/oz yesterday.)

Somehow, this feels like economic DOOM! news for Old Blighty: some fun-loving youths of carefully-unmentioned ethnic extraction engage in a minor altercation with British cops. Nothing much to it really, hardly worth mentioning. It's not as if this is an unprecedented development, after all. Get a load of the fabled British reserve:

Rod Hansen, Avon and Somerset Constabulary: "This was unacceptable behaviour."

In poor boned L.A., the beating heart of poor boned California, there is a growing understanding that the world has changed but that habits and attitudes have not. The problem in California, as in the nation more generally, is of the most vexing kind: the only solutions that have a prayer of working (drastic cuts, austerity, aggressive pro-growth economic and tax policies) go completely against the prevailing political grain. So the trend is to incrementalism, which won't work but at least slows the DOOM! train down some and gives the illusion of addressing the problem.

Behold the glory of the Tur-Kat! The product of long years of turtle-feline hybridization experiments! Look upon me, mortal, and be amazed! ... and cleanse my litter box that I may poop.

posted by Monty at 09:22 AM

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