Remember GM? Remember how they were deeply in debt and losing money but people kept lending them more money and the government kept giving them money and everything was going to be OK until, finally, it wasn’t? Our whole country is kind of like GM now except there is no cosmic entity that is going to come down from above and bail us out since our ADMITTED debt burden is already 25% of the entire planet’s GDP.
-Phil’s Stock World
Why are we fucked?
Because what’s good for Wall Street isn’t necessarily what’s good for the American people.
40 months into the downturn that has given us the worst number of job losses since the Great Depression, we are nowhere near a recovery. This is terrible, this is unprecedented, this is – great for business!
Bill McBride of Calcuclated Risk, reminds us that Wall Street’s "dirty little secret" is that Wall Street and corporate America like the unemployment rate to be a little high. Higher unemployment keeps wage growth down, and helps with margins and earnings – and higher unemployment also keeps the Fed funds flowing freely. Corporations like to see SOME job growth, so people have enough confidence to spend (and they can have a few more customers) but they don’t care if that job growth is in the US or China
-Phil’s Stock World
And things are getting interesting in Washington.
While DC may continue playing its debt ceiling soap opera, crunch time for the Treasury is approaching as the first of three auctions is on deck: the first one for $32 billion in 3 Year Notes. The total raised will be $72 billion without any offsets from maturities. Elsewhere, the Treasury will catch a $16 billion break after it settles $100 billion in Bill maturities offset by $84 billion in new issuance, yet still the net total of $56 billion in new debt seems to be a slight problem since as of Friday, there was just $23 billion in total capacity under the debt ceiling. Granted, the Treasury has already announced it is commencing the tapering off of other debt programs such as the State and Local Government (SLGs) which however will have at most $5-10 billion in favorable impact per month. It is also cutting its debt issuance forecast in half, likely due to an expectation of maturing old Bills without rolling these, a feat which will consume all if not more of the $108.9 billion in total cash available at the Treasury.
-Zero Hedge
Enter John Boehner.
“Without significant spending cuts and reforms to reduce our debt, there will be no debt limit increase. And the cuts should be greater than the accompanying increase in debt authority the president is given. We should be talking about cuts of trillions, not just billions.”
-Speaker of the House, John Boehner
This calls for a George Washington quote.
Are we going go back from koolaid drinkers of false hope to mindless terrorized sheep? Or are we going to stand up as brave, independent, thinking people and demand real change?
-George Washington
