Oh wait – the answer is ‘none’.
The very notion that this ‘deal’ has somehow done anything, other than than, well, nothing – is laughable, despite what folks at Reuters would have you believe with headlines that look like this:
The United States is poised to step back from the brink of economic disaster on Tuesday when a bitterly fought deal to cut the budget deficit is expected to clear its final hurdles.
Maybe someone should clue them in that there hasn’t been a “step back” from anything. The U.S. is still bankrupt. None of the so-called budget cuts and fat-trimming can or will do anything to ultimately save the fattened whale from $100-odd-trillion in unfunded liabilities. Maybe they were able to quickly hang up another sheet to keep the naked king hidden a little longer, but other than that, this deal means exactly one thing: nothing.
A friend down South referred to the whole ordeal as “nothing more than nauseating political theatre” – and I would tend to agree.
Following the so called deal, one could’ve expected soaring (or at least recovering) stock markets and a drop in the gold price, and yet here we are on Tuesday morning with gold eclipsing another all-time high (denominated in $USD) surpassing $1640 / oz. I imagine we’ll see a bit of a correction sometime today, but I doubt it’ll come from the real investors.
In the mean-time, those in the know (also known as “those who don’t have their head crammed in the sand”) can continue to wait for whatever is coming, chuckling with the incredulous disbelief that the charade continues.
