It's a fucking orgy!

You know it's an orgy.

These days, whether you are Christian or not, the feast to mark the birth of Jesus Christ has turned into a winter bacchanal and a huge retailing orgy. Of course, there was always a commercial side to Christmas, if only for breeders of poultry and makers of greeting cards.

The European Central Bank is making its reputation at this time of turmoil and crisis. Barely a month after the rejection of the European Union Constitution in France and the Netherlands, the EU Summit in Brussels ended in a surprisingly acrimonious orgy of national egoisms and no deal.

In short, the crisis in Syria warrants outside intervention, but mostly with tools other than arms. What is needed is an approach that hastens the demise of the Assad regime and increases the odds that what comes after will not be an orgy of vengeance, violence, and chaos.

During the era of Ponzi style growth, capital flows were channeled by commercial banks into a frenzy of consumption and by the state into an orgy of suspect procurement and outright profligacy. To ensure that this time is different, Greece will need to reform its social economy and political system.

President Barack Obama s new budget calls for a stunning 1.75 trillion deficit in the United States, a multiple of the previous record. Even those countries that are not actively engaged in a fiscal orgy are seeing their surpluses collapse and their deficits soar, mainly in the face of falling tax revenues.

By the criteria of international use as a reserve currency among central banks and as a vehicle in foreign exchange markets, the most rapid declines took place from 1978 to 1991 and from 2001 to 2010. Between these two intervals, from 1992 to 2000, there was a clear reversal of the trend, notwithstanding a popular orgy of dollar declinism around the middle of that decade.

According to some contemporary observers, however, pent up demand was only part of the story. During the brief but deep recession of 1949, the financial commentator Silvia Porter reflected on the attitudes that led to the 1929 crash We saw nothing wrong in fact, we saw everything right with the wild speculative boom and credit inflation that culminated in the now almost unbelievable gambling orgy of 1929.

In the US, the collapse of grownup Republicans in Congress the extraordinary failure of fiscal conservatives to mount any effective opposition to the Bush administration's renewed destabilization of American government finances. The deficit orgy of the Reagan era is looking less like a freak political accident and more like a structural feature of Republican Party governance what the modern Republican governing coalition tends to do whenever it gains power