People have been warning for years that the world has been carrying our public debt and negative balance of trade, despite both having passed beyond sound creditworthiness, because the US is “too big to fail”. Our creditor nations hold too many assets tied to the value of the dollar for them to want to see the dollar crash, and too many tied to the value of the US stock market for them to be willing to risk those valuations in the course of toughening up on their further lending, or letting the dollar find a truer valuation. In effect, these assets have been our hostage against our creditors getting tough with us.

How much of the value of these hostage assets is now gone? How much of it was tied up in CDSs and other nth order derivatives and hedges that are now probably not worth the paper they’re printed on?

If the answer is “most”, or even “a whole lot”, then maybe we are approaching the day of reckoning with our foreign creditors and purchasers. We’ve already killed their hostages. They no longer have any reason to send good money after bad, by further lending to a nation that seems determined to live beyond its means.

It is also appreciated that comments are overwhelmed by the conspiracy theorist crowd pandering their demagogic pabulum. Demagogic illusion is not a substitute for knowledge. Usurping facts to the service of opinion can be a dangerous illusion and dilutes the authority of fact.

Ignorance of economics is the fountainhead of the forces that brought the country to the present state; ignorance of economics will not resolve any economic issues necessary for survival.

Once Sovereigns were schooled into the exercise of economic forces necessary to maintain themselves and the state or to find such council if they knew they were deficient. With either a Republic or a Democracy, the requirement for such schooling is no different, to the contrary is of greater importance to the state. It has been a deficiency unobserved and unappreciated. It is probably too late in the day to obtain the necessary education to address the necessary issues, the noise of the demagogues already fully overwhelm all sage council, those in authority ignorant of the need of sage council and unable to discern such wisdom from the clamoring pack.

All the hallmarks of the current bailout have their antecedents in the exercise of state terror upon their populations, this one is no different, to gain advantage for a few against the best interests of the population. The ideology driving such acts is not only bankrupt, but an aggregation of economic bunkum unequaled in academic history. The heist of treasure alone, is real, as will be the consequences.

Ian, would it be possible for you to privately e-mail me with your e-mail address using my login info here? I am not particularly fond of comments being hijacked and put into service of conspiracy theories as some here are wont to do.

Dude, so TI was Taiwan Instruments? And IBM was India Business Machines? And I guess Apple was originally Pomegranate, and surely the Japanese founded Microsoft… :)

The best measure of health care is the lonevity of the citizenry. The UK has better longeevity that the US, and spends the same percentage of GDP as medicate in the US for cradle to grave health care for its whole population.

A major component of health care is public health, clean water, childhood immunizations, pre-natal care, and housing for the homeless. Health care is not hooking up eldery terminal patient to an expensive ICU and draining the money out of their bank accout.

A good health care system does not have doctors coming out of medical school $200,000 in debt and being able to reture after 10 years on the job. A good health care system does not have 6 clerks for every doctor, 3 in the doctors’ office and 3 in the insurance companies, fighting about money. A good health care system does not have cascading levels of profit centers, the incurance company cut, the drug company cut, the hospital comapany cut, and the doctors’ cut.

As Obama said, the US does not have a health care system. It has a disease care system

Framing the present intranational credit crisis in terms of the much larger problems we have with our international credit habit is quite appropriate, but take the analysis the next step. Look how we’ve responded to the smaller problem so far. Kleptocracy as usual. Not even an attempt to face any reckoning, or deal with the underlying problems and root causes — we’re just going to borrow another $700 billion to fork over to the usual kleptocrats, in a plan that doesn’t even begin to promise to solve even the immediate problem of economically vital credit markets seizing up.

If this is how we respond to the internal credit crisis, what sort of response will we come up with as our foreign creditors apply ever stronger and ever more overt pressure on their deadbeat debtor, the US? The history of prior banana republics instructs us that faux-populist, hyper-nationalist demagouges will seize the opportunity to rise to, or retain, power on the backs of a scheme to nationalize foreign-held debt. And, while an Argentina can’t get very far with that, the world’s sole hyperpower very probably will be able to make it work. The repudiation of debt will not, of course, be called that. It will be sold as making our creditors finally pay the just price for all of that protection against global terrorism we have impoverished ourselves to pay for, in the form of our huge “defense” expenditures. And they will be compelled, under pain of the US Navy stopping all of their international trade, to continue fresh payments indefinitely into the future. We won’t have the problem an Argentina had after repudiating foreign debt, of not being able to get further credit. We’ll just convert the transfer of wealth involved from nominal loans to actual tribute.

“a bit of both”

I just watched tonight’s SNL parody (if you can really call it that) of the Bide-Palin debate. OMG I laughed myself silly. It was amazing.

Funny thing was they were pretty much just reading off the real debate.

Maverick! Heh