For the occasional visitor to DNI who isn’t also reading Fabius Maximus, I suggest a quick trip over to “The Last Opportunity for Effective Action Before Disaster Strikes.” As he points out, the government has tried at least 15 initiatives to contain the escalating financial crisis since it began in December 2006. You can tell from today’s headlines how well they’ve worked.

We’ve now reached the point of no return:

Now the US financial system is seizing up. The machinery remains, but the gears no longer turn. Most of you have no idea to what I am referring, but you will learn over the next few weeks. To use a bad medical analogy, the financial system has had a cardiac arrest. Rather than describe the problem, this post describes solutions.

This is serious stuff, even for Fabius:

The recession is coming, and the current financial crisis has exacerbated it. We should prepare for something longer and deeper than 1973-75 or 1980-82 (the worst since the 1930’s). Let’s not wait to begin mitigation efforts. Anyone asking “Dude, where’s my recession” should be banned from the Internet for life.

What this means is that the national security policies of the presidential candidates are irrelevant.  A country that has to borrow on our scale just to keep the bare machinery of commerce going isn’t going to be spending hundreds of billions of that money on foreign adventures or even on maintaining our current posture in Iraq. The candidates might as well be debating plans to colonize Jupiter.

Readers tempted to blow off Fabius might look back over his posts on our financial crisis and judge his track record for themselves.