Quote of the Day
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on August 7th, 2011 4:38 am by HL
Quote of the Day
“Ask Donald Trump to be Treasury secretary. Have Donald Trump take the job for 90 days. It’s a game changer.”
— Mike Huckabee, quoted by CNN, saying President Obama needs to fire Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
Perry Tells Bundlers to Get Ready
The Austin American Statesman reports the people who are expecting to raise money for a potential Rick Perry presidential campaign got “their marching orders.”
“Leaders of Perry’s fundraising operation sent information on how to raise money for a presidential campaign to potential bundlers — the people who will be tasked with raising hundreds of thousands or dollars, or more, from their friends and business associates… Sending information to bundlers is not the same as raising money. But it’s another sign of what has become fairly obvious, which is that Perry will announce for the Republican presidential nomination very soon. Sensing that momentum is on his side, Perry’s team wants a quick show of force as soon as he enters the campaign, and raising the first few millions of dollars quickly would allow that to happen.”
Why the Downgrade Makes Sense
Felix Salmon: “Any student of sovereign default knows that it is born of precisely the kind of failures of governance that we saw during the debt-ceiling debate. That is why the US cannot hold a triple-A rating from S&P: the chance of having a dysfunctional Congress in future is 100%, and a dysfunctional Congress, armed with a statutory debt ceiling, is an extremely dangerous thing, and very far from risk-free.”
“Yes, there’s a lot of fiscal math in the S&P statement. But at heart, any sovereign ratings decision is political, not economic: the economics is there to provide a veneer of empirical respectability to what is fundamentally a value judgment. We saw the values of Congress during the debt-ceiling debate, including various members of the House who said with genuine sincerity that they’d actually welcome a default. In that context, S&P’s judgment is hard to fault.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that in a conference call with reporters S&P called the bitter stand-off between President Obama and Congress over raising the debt ceiling a “debacle” and warned that further downgrades may lie ahead.
