Well, President Obama continues to lead us into the quagmire of financial collapse, and the world is noticing. From the article in Financial Times:
The market had hoped for a “Grand Bargain”. Instead, it got a small, ultimately insufficient fiscal deal. The best to be said of the agreement hammered out on New Year’s eve is that it beat the alternative. While investors still cheered, nobody should mistake this for an economic, fiscal, or financial positive. Ideally Washington would have crafted a deal coupling long-term tax and entitlement reform with short-term stimulus. Instead, we got the opposite. The US now faces significant fiscal drag on an already sluggish recovery.
The drag might have been justified had the agreement actually addressed the long-term fiscal outlook. But it failed to tackle the US tax code’s dysfunction or the sustainability of major entitlement programmes. In abdicating any effort to stabilise the national debt, Washington now risks an eventual loss of international confidence in the US. Short term, it is not even clear that this deal does much to address the deficit. With significant fiscal drag still embedded in the deal, the economy is unlikely to grow as fast as current budget estimates assume. If growth disappoints, as it almost surely will, revenue will be below expectations and deficits above.
The Obama Administration and its synchophants in Congress, in their effort to look constructive while doing nothing, is not fooling the intelligent investor. We are crashing, and the world is getting out while it can.
Thank you for your leadership, President Obama!
The rest of the article is here: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/46e98...#axzz2ID4hCwQZ