U.S. House passes Speaker John Boehner's debt-ceiling bill

It's DOA in the Senate. No fucking way there will be a balanced-budget amendment passed by February, and people know that. Balanced-budget amendments are retarded. In a good year you want to have a surplus (that is invested domestically or used to pay down debt) and in a bad year you want to have the ability to deficit-spend to jump-start the economy. A budget that is balanced cyclically makes more sense, but most people don't know what that means (and implementation would be difficult, if not impossible).

Reid will push his own bill that won't make it through the House, and there will be a last-minute (to the extent the August 2nd deadline is real, which it isn't) passage of a small ceiling increase with nominal spending cuts that will get us through another few months.

The U.S. deserves the downgrade that it absolutely will be getting. Even if it passes a bill by Tuesday it won't be enough to convince the agencies that at some point in the future payments will be missed because politicians can't stop circle-jerking. I personally don't mind a downgrade because it means my group makes more money as people buy Treasury-surrogates.

What we SHOULD do is default on all bonds held by the Chinese. It's a blow to our biggest competitor, saves us money, and there's nothing they can do about it. We should also tax the shit out of everything that comes out of that country. And for fuck's sake appreciate their exchange rate by taxing dollar-yuan conversions. We'd clean their clocks in a good ol' shootin' war. Only thing they can do is start expropriatin' U.S. property over there, at which point we can and should do the same to commie bank accounts and property over here.

Bottom line, we're in pretty bad shape.