The whole world is hearing that the US debt ceiling must be raised in order to prevent a default.
This boggles my mind. How screwy is a world in which one's creditworthiness is maintained to the extent that one continues accumulating debt!!! The US must assume further debt to be considered more creditworthy? WTF?
If you adhere to the philosophy that 'money is debt' (as I, Ben Bernanke, and I believe pretty much all modern bankers do) then it starts to make a whole lot more sense.
If one has run out of the ability to take on debt then they have by definition, run out of the ability to produce money. And who wants to have dealings with an entity who is in that situation?
Dig up the 'Money as Debt' vid by Paul Grignon on Youtube if you have not already. I have come to accept most of his assurtions simply because they are so good at explaining so many otherwise baffleing things. My favorite quote from it is as follows:
The process by which money is created is so simple that the mind is repelled. -John Kenneth Galbraith