Market

None. That’s the total of on-the-other-hand good news I have to report this week. Lest you think I am overlooking the debt deal cut in Washington last week, consider this:

We worry as we prepare to fire up our barbeques, head for the beaches and ballparks, and otherwise celebrate our hard won independence from British despotism.

If you are an oil trader, the daily jiggles in the price of oil are of interest: if you guess right, it’s champagne and caviar; if you bet wrong, it’s beer and potato chips.

Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport had been planning to provide an initial public offering to investors this week, allowing folks from around the world to buy shares in the currently private company that operates the facility. Suddenly, over Memorial Day weekend and in the middle of the night, Domodedovo sent out a statement saying that it had canceled its plans and pulled the IPO. Why, and why so suddenly?

The black day – with the red ink – arrived this week: America reached the limits of what it can borrow. But the world didn’t end, the economy didn’t grind to a halt, and the dollar didn’t collapse.

In Obama’s speech on the budget deficit earlier this month, the president went out of his way to praise the free market, but balanced it against the need for collective action sponsored by the government:           

Larry Summers, the just-departed White House economic adviser, says today’s credit crunch has a new culprit. “In the early days of the crisis, there was clearly a problem with lenders being unable to lend even to creditworthy borrowers,” he says in an interview in The International Economy magazine. But no more.

Pity the poor economist trying to create a coherent picture of the U.S. economy from the bits and pieces of the data jigsaw puzzle, the most recent piece of which was Friday’s jobs report.

No need to do a careful analysis of the budget President Obama dropped on the desks of the Congress last week – a few broad brushstrokes paint the picture.

Talking late this afternoon with THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Republican congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin blasted New York Times columnist Paul Krugman for his "intellectualy lazy" attack on Ryan's fiscal "Roadmap." In his Friday column, Krugman called Ryan a "charlatan" and his plan to reform the welfare state and eliminate the debt a "fraud" that is "drenched in flimflam sauce." Ryan responded to Krugman in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel over the weekend, and elaborated on his criticisms of Krugman this afternooon.

We are all Greeks now. Or so it would seem if we are guided by the gyrations of share prices. Or if we believe that today’s Greece is tomorrow’s United States. After all, we are running Grecian-style deficits, our debt-to-GDP ratio is approaching the magic 90 percent mark that stifles growth and makes it more difficult to bring the budget deficit under control, and the effective U.S. tax rate on new corporate investment is estimated by economists Duanjie Chen and Jack Mintz of the University of Calgary in Canada to be almost twice an 80-nation average. With no room to raise taxes, and no political will to cut outlays, it is not unreasonable to worry that America might decide to print money to pay off its creditors, triggering inflation. At a minimum, the Greek tragedy has focused attention on America’s river of red ink, even though the parallels are far from exact.