Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Pretty Darn Fucked

United States Capitol
Capitol Hill; Washinton, DC
America is a funny country. Here’s just one example why:

Two days after S&P downgraded the American economy’s rating from AAA to AA, President Barack Obama essentially dismissed the credit rating:

“Markets will rise and fall. But this is the United States of America. No matter what some agency may say, we've always been and always will be a triple-A country"-
President Obama

If that statement doesn’t exude confidence, I don’t know what does. Or wait, is the word to be used here ‘denial’? For, even as global markets shriek alarms of economic calamity, Obama, our man stands at a lectern to give a speech that could easily be mistaken for a campaign speech. At best, a press briefing. But nothing to speak as warning of a nation on its fiscal tenterhooks, struggling to tame a staggering accumulation of debt.

And yet, on the other hand, is the former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Obama’s one time confidante, Christina Romer who didn’t mince any words when speaking of the situation on television said that the credit downgrade was a sign that the country was “pretty darn fucked”

While I’m far from any sort of expertise on financial matters (I barely manage to understand my own), I do know that the credit downgrade is not the end of it. It is, if anything, the proverbial ‘beginning’.
On that, I shall keep my rant continuing, but a photograph of the day that I found to be most appropriate – almost like the closest physical visual of the saga – Capitol Hill.

While Capitol Hill is actually a neighborhood in the District of Columbia (DC), where the Congress building resides, it has come to be a metonym for the United States Congress. The actual congress building, as seen above is called the United States Capitol.