Hot Air » Blog Archive » Foreign banks dumping the dollar?
As Altman argued in a Financial Times op-ed piece today: “The dismal deficit outlook poses a huge longer-term threat. Indeed, it is just a matter of time before global financial markets reject this fiscal trajectory. That could lead to a punishing dollar crisis.”Pethokoukis imagines a campaign slogan for 2010 and 2012 being, “Who lost the dollar?” It might make for a good slogan at that, but blaming it all on Obama would be a little too easy. The crisis has its roots in policies that go back at least a decade, and in deficit spending that began to get out of hand with a Republican Congress and Republican President and went insanely wrong when Democrats took control.
For almost half a century we Baby Boomers have been told that our “long-term” financial health was being threatened by out-of-control government spending, that we were “putting our grandchildren and great-grandchildren into impossible debt,” with predictable results of the sort that usually result from the attractive offer: “I’ll give you bright and shiny things now, and you won’t have to pay for them until you are old and gray or, better yet, you’ll never pay for them, but somebody will, long after you’re dead.”
Most opted for the bright and shiny things now, and to hell with some hypothetical future. Well, guess what? Most of us have managed to live long enough that, as the old wheeze goes, “The Future Is Now.”
And it’s every bit as ugly as they told us it would be. Even worse, we’ve managed to elect a bunch of people who are hell-bent on making it even uglier, if they can.
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The living embodiment of The Wimpy School Of Economics: “I’d gladly have my child/grandchild pay you, sometime next decade/next half-century/next millenium, for rilly cool, neat-o stuff this week/month/year!!”
No longer the point, and almost entirely a waste of hot air, bandwidth and/or “dead-tree” print.
Wrangling over the “root causes” of the nasty situation continues to obfuscate the real point to be made: It’s time to stop kicking the macroeconomic “can” down the road!!
And - assuming, of course, that we can do that; that it’s not already too late to do so - where and how do we start?
IMHO, “firing” most (if not all) of the Inside-The-Beltway Bandits would seem to be an excellent start - just as soon and as thoroughly as possible.
This may not be their intent, but it may well be their result. Their recklessness outruns even my cynicism.
That would be some world-class sprinting, nemo.