Why $700,000,000,000?

So how did the US Treasury Department settle on the $700 billion bail-out figure? Good question:

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

Well, that’s reassuring. And after watching Preznit Bush’s address last night, we can all rest secure in the knowledge that our economic futures are in capable hands.

[Via Matthew Yglesias]

Posted by Betty Cracker on 09/25/08 at 07:12 AM • Permalink

Categories: Politics •

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Betty, you misunderstand. What they’re trying to to is sort of a “high-concept” thing—not so much a classical “bailout” as a performance-art-style meta-statement on the essential irrelevance of quantitative conventions like “numbers” to an essentially semantic artifact such as a “financial crisis.”

The Treasury Department rightly views the whole situation (and all proposed responses) as interpretive, improvisational, contextually-dependent and fundamentally indeterminate in any “absolute” sense.

In other words, we have officially entered the Age of Quantum Economics.

Comment by StrangeAppar8us on 09/25/08 at 08:40 AM
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