Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

• Timothy Jost: Prospective income verification a fantasy
• Menzie Chinn: Policy Uncertainty, October 14, 2013
• Paul Ford: Open-Source Everything: The Moral of the Healthcare.gov Debacle
• Tom Kludt: Houston Chronicle Retracts Its Endorsement of Ted Cruz

And:

1. "Treasury running out of money to pay its bills would have dire economic consequences. But the mere possibility has already taken a toll…. Macroeconomic Advisers… released a new assessment suggesting that the fiscal instability of recent years, along with austerity policies, bumped up the unemployment rate by more than one percentage point. It’s easy to blame this all on Ted Cruz, Tea Party Republicans, and groups like Heritage Action…. It’s the less extreme Republicans, the ones who know better, who allowed this to happen, because they never stood up to the far right wing. And one reason they stayed silent is nobody stood up to lead them. That somebody should have been Boehner": Jonathan Cohn: Shutdown Endgame: US Citizens Will Suffer
2. "Democratic unity went beyond a (correct) calculation that it would be dangerous to pay any ransom at all… a genuine moral revulsion at the tactics and audacity of a party that had lost a presidential election by 5 million votes, lost another chance to win a favorable Senate map, and lost the national House vote demanding the winning party give them its way without compromise. Probably the single biggest Republican mistake was in failing to understand the way its behavior would create unity in the opposing party. Not until the very end, when the crisis was well under way, did any conservatives even acknowledge the Democratic view that the GOP had threatened basic governing norms…. Paul Ryan Republican… seemed to think their extortion scheme was a simple business deal. Its collapse is one of the brightest days Washington has seen in a grim era": Jonathan Chait: Stop Fretting: The Debt-Ceiling Crisis Is Over!
3. "Give the Republicans on Capitol Hill one thing: they don’t leave a job half done. Evidently disturbed by polls showing Congress with a single-digit approval rating, they appear intent on driving it to zero. What other explanation can there be for Tuesday’s farcical maneuvers?": John Cassidy: G.O.P. Blues: Another Farcical Day on Capitol Hill
4. "A technical default at most would freeze immediate payments. But if the market continues to believe in the solvency of the US, they will continue to circulate those claims regardless. Which means the fate of the US will be determined by market psychology not a handful of loose cannon politicians in Washington. The fact that there is no cross-default clause will help immensely on this front as well. Everything becomes a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘whether’. The great thing for markets is that ‘when’ creates an incentive to hold securities regardless. It also provides a monetisation or substitution mechanism for those who need the cash payments immediately or are not allowed to hold defaulted securities": Isabella Kaminzka: Some are born solvent, some achieve solvency, and some have solvency thrust upon them