“California, New York and other states are showing many of the same signs of debt overload that recently took Greece to the brink,” the New York Times reports. “Budgets that will not balance, accounting that masks debt, the use of derivatives to plug holes, and armies of retired public workers who are counting on benefits that are proving harder and harder to pay” are just a few of the self-inflicted wounds that have led New Hampshire to try and dip into its medical malpractice insurance pool and Colorado to attempt a rip-off of a private company that sells worker’s compensation insurance and the rest of the country to turn to scratch-off tickets and four-day school weeks as solutions.
Despite concerns about slow-growth and credit squeezes, “State officials say a Greece-style financial crisis is a complete nonissue for them,” the Times reports. People are still buying state bonds, you see, and Moody’s–the same agency that gave stellar ratings to all those subprime CDOs even though they were jam-packed with half-a-million-dollar loans made to borrowers who couldn’t make their first payment on a $30 QVC purchase–says all 50 states have “investment-grade credit ratings.”