Indeed, I must agree that you seem to detect a double standard.

Sawz, I have no intention of trying to explain away facts.

I think, however, that tracing these things to their root causes only a smallportion of our current difficulties are attributable to decisions taken in the last twelve months. The house of cards tumbled into a hellhole in the eight previous years with huge unwarranted military operations, bloated contractor costs, and a business environment that would have made a robber baron proud. Your Big Guy drove the country into a hole, and you are yelling about the balance sheet this year. National economies do not work that way.
The Bush Recession is finally showing some signs of being over, but we have a long way to go before we can call our economy sane, a large part of which comes under the heading of reform--such as, for example, divesting investment houses from banking houses, a workable method which we had under Glass-Steagal, but which Reagan eradicated under pressure from adventurous and irresponsible money men.


That said, I think the SecTreas is doomed, and Obama will have to (and will) face that fact sometime in the next six months. I also think he should have held a tougher line, and Bernanke especially should have also. But the TARP game invented by Paulson (who is not a gang, but the previous SecTreas) to try and solve the Bush collapse was already in play, and politics is an awful game.

A