Another Very Special Thanksgiving Treat From Your Wonkette!
We want to give our Thanks to you, the Wonkette readers, on this last publishing day before our one-day bank holiday. Earlier, Ken shared a beautiful, warm 'n' fuzzy YouTube poem with you, and now it is your male associate editor's turn. Click the "MORE" thing for a magical, escapist treat that celebrates America and, more importantly, the Pilgrims, whom we honor every year because one night, several hundred years ago, they invited the savages over to their condo for a big dinner. CLICK 4 FUN --->
A Children's Treasury Of Apocalyptic Economic Wonkery Relating To Currency And Public Debt(!)
Nouriel "Dr. Doom" Roubini: "Desperate times and desperate economic news require desperate policy actions ... The Treasury will be issuing in the next two years about $2 trillion of additional debt ... These policies – however partially necessary – will eventually leads to much higher real interest rates on the public debt and weaken the US dollar once this tsunami of implicit and explicit public liabilities and monetary debt driven by rising twin fiscal and current account deficits will hit a world where the global supply of savings is shrinking – as most countries moves to fiscal deficits thus reducing global savings – and foreign investors start to ponder the long term sustainability of the US domestic and external liabilities.
Willem Buiter: "Getting banks to lend again is even more essential than getting primary and secondary markets for illiquid structured financial products going again. It may be even more important than getting the regular commercial paper market going again, important though that is. Small and medium enterprises rely overwhelmingly on banks for external finance. Without access to bank loans, credit lines and overdraft facilities, countless SMEs that would be perfectly viable with a functional financial and banking system are threatened with bankruptcy. Without working capital, businesses go out of business. Banks are essential. But they are not lending. Why?"
[This one is hilarious -- Ed.] Ian Welsh: "The influx of money into the US to buy treasuries has been the cause of the dollar soaring. Money will have to continue to flood into the United States to fund this, and will likewise need to gush over to Europe, Japan, Korea and other countries who are throwing money at the financial crisis. This is going to be a very Darwinian period, and it's going to cause a lot of countries on the periphery, including most of Africa, South America and good chunks of Asia, to shake apart. All that money coming into the 1st world will mean no money for them. Combine that with a complete crash in commodities prices and they will be starved for hard currency. Since most of these nations are not able to feed themselves, this will mean famines, starvation, food riots and fallen governments. Of immediate concern to the US, barring massive US help, I would expect that Mexico will slip into indisputable anarchy in large areas of the country within a year or so."
Meh, boring.
Here's a video of Daft Punk doing some nasty robot shit at Coachella '06: