There are two things going on here that both use the word credit. Letters of credit have nothing to do with credit. They are created when you have foreign buyers and sellers who, by definition, don't trust each other but who do trust the banks. When a buyer obtains a letter of credit, that says that the bank has the money in an account with which to cover the value of the letter, not that they are willing to extend credit to the buyer but that they have the money. The letter will define what paper the foreign bank needs to release it (airway bill, bill of lading, customs clearance, etc). When the buyers bank has the requisite documentation, they transfer the letter amount to the seller's bank. There's a whole currency subtext that goes on here because buyer and seller get paid in their native currencies.

I would be very surprised if the banks didn't trust each other. I suspect that what's really going on is that the buyers don't actually have the money and, like so much of commerce, they need to borrow the money from their bank to complete the transaction. If their bank won't extend credit to them, they also won't write a letter of credit if they don't already have the cash in the bank. The rest of your description follows.

is what standards do the balance advocates have and what does that say about them? Your article did not state this explicitly but truth and balance are two distinctly different and non-overlapping concepts. Balance is, indeed, important in the sense that both (or all, if there are more than two) sides should have the ability to present their case. This would be akin to what the WSJ used to do back in the '80s (when I still took the paper) where they would simply put two articles, one written by a supporter and the other by an opponent, in the paper. The WSJ made no comment; all they were doing was providing a soap box.

However comma when YOU write an article in which you include the positions of both sides wherein you merely accept both positions without regard to their truthfulness and without mentioning things that were left out of either side of the topic, you are not providing your readers with any service (and probably could have skipped writing the article entirely) and to do so consistently strikes me as amoral. In the instant case, comparing the outrage at our government's behavior in Iraq (it wasn't just Democrats) to Palin's "pallin' around with terrorists" is disingenuous at best and a fine example of the amorality I mentioned.

The standard Keynesian prescription of having the government spend its way out of trouble cannot fully be applied in this situation. Why? Because the government is already on a spending spree and, as a result, our national debt is ~ $11 Trillion dollars (double what it was 8 years ago). It is an unsustainable level of debt that has people talking about lowering the USGs debt rating. So anything we do is going to have to be done carefully.

The one thing you can use as a benchmark for weather the CWICs (Chief Weenies In Charge) know what they're going is if they recognize that our military spending must be drastically reduced - on the order of 75% or more. We cannot afford to spend as much as the rest of the world put together on the military any longer. Our response to this crisis simply cannot be ideologically driven if it is to succeed which means that nothing good will happen as long as the current regime is still in power. Parts of the government will need to be frozen. Other parts will have to be cut back, and still other parts will need to be augmented.

It will not be easy.

The only just outcome would involve dark, dank dungeons and large hairy spiders as well as larger, equally hairy rats.

What's with this apparently new $250B program? Where the hell did this come from? It's not quite what I had thought should be done but it will have the same effect. As far as I know, they haven't been wasting any of our $700B yet soping up the toxic paper yet. Seeing the Brits moving swiftly and decisively in the right direction has been gratifying and also emphasizes my original reaction to the Paulson plan - why would we trust this, the most incompetent administration in our country's history, to make good decisions in a crisis? They haven't done anything right so far; what makes you think they're gonna start now?

Your problem, Glenn, is that you read what these guys say. I long ago stopped doing that as they generally add no new information, only their ideologically tinged opinions. But, as I learned long ago, opinions are like assholes - everybody's got one. So I figured I'd roll my own instead of borrowing somebody else's.

but not for consumer debt. Rather you want them funding short term commercial paper that will keep the business world lubricated. I don't know how you force that without making the US a command economy. And that wouldn't be good.

But I also don't think that spending our way out of this will work either. We have less than nothing to spend and one of the more incompetent regimes on the planet trying to spend it.....