Corcoran: Obama set to lose his ‘Armageddon’

Obama created the debt-limit crisis in an attempt to foment a political panic

We have only days to go until the United States hits Aug. 2 and a possible financial “Armageddon,” to use a phrase adopted by U.S. President Barack Obama. I had to look the word up. Armageddon is “the last battle between good and evil before the Day of Judgment,” and “the scene of a final battle between the forces of good and evil, prophesied to occur at the end of the world.”

As time moves ever closer to the appointed hour of doom, the less armageddonish the U.S. debt crisis looks. For starters, the Aug. 2 deadline was based on some early U.S. Treasury cash-flow estimates based on certain assumptions about spending and tax receipts. As usual in the forecasting game, those assumptions turned out to be wrong and reports now say the U.S. government will have enough cash to take it through to Aug. 10, maybe even Aug. 17.

Let’s face it. If there’s cash to get through another week or two, the probability is that the political wrangling in Washington between the President, Democrats and Republicans will extend beyond Aug. 2 and an alleged end-of-the-world deadline will come and go.

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