When your biggest creditor demands assurance that you will meet your obligations, what do you do? You tell them what they want to hear, of course: The White House has reassured China that its $2 trillion stockpile of US investments are safe, despite the global economic crisis. Robert Gibbs, a spokesman for Barack Obama, the US president, said on Friday: "There's no safer investment in the world than in the United States." Gibbs was responding to comments by Wen Jiabao, China's prime minister, who voiced concern over the outlook of US government bonds, calling on Washington to ease worries about US assets. Speaking at his annual news conference on Friday, Wen expressed concern that massive US deficit spending and near-zero interest rates could erode the value of China's bond holdings. China is the biggest holder of US government debt and has invested an estimated 70 per cent of its $2 trillion stockpile of foreign exchange reserves, the world's largest, in dol...

... with an assist from Disloyal Opposition's JD Tuccille. He starts where Tyler did: President-Elect Barack Obama cautions that his economic plans will probably have the United States running "trillion-dollar deficits for years to come." Before the ink has dried on news reports of his mind-boggling concession, the Congressional Budget Office raises a red flag (PDF) and warns that the next resident of the White House is being unreasonably optimistic -- the tidal wave of red ink about to engulf the federal budget is bigger than anticipated even before taking into account Obama's plans for a "new New Deal." It's all right, the president-to-be's partisans tell us. That vast new spending is necessary and will pull us out of recession just the way the FDR-era programs on which it's modeled saved us from the Great Depression. From there he goes into a detailed examination of why virtually all serious modern scholarship on the New Deal (aside from Pau...