August 30, 2011
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This essay is excerpted from a recent version of The Credit Strategist (formerly the HCM Market Letter). To obtain the complete issue, you must subscribe directly to this publication; Please go here. The Credit Strategist is on Twitter - @credstrategist
“The economies of Europe and the United States have
arrived at the moment when they no longer have
any conceivable hope of being able to pay for the huge public
commitments they’ve amassed the past 40 years. This
year’s ‘debt crisis’ has been building for decades.”
The Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2011, “The Global Rout”
The debt-ceiling overhang
Readers will remember the 1987 nomination fight over the appointment of Robert Bork to the United States Supreme Court. Mr. Bork, a law professor at Yale University, was by all accounts highly qualified for the position but held extremely conservative legal views. Senate Democrats turned the process into a lynching of Bork because they opposed his conservative views. The lowlight of the hearings was the late Senator Ted Kennedy’s peroration that, “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.” Senator Kennedy was a great orator, and his words sealed the Senate’s rejection of the nomination even though they grossly caricatured Bork’s views.
Just three years later, Clarence Thomas, who most would agree was far less qualified than Bork (a view that has been borne out by his performance on the bench), was nominated for the Supreme Court by President George Bush and treated to what he described as a high-tech lynching. Thomas’s nomination was approved by a sharply divided Senate after a series of hearings that made the recent debt-ceiling debate look dignified.
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