We are heading in the direction of Argentina (an example of what happened in Argentina on YouTube).
Cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgfnNVoorms
The problem in very recent history traces back to the September and October months of 2008, when Wall Street investment banks and the US banking system died. These banks have not and will not recover, since they died.
Some deaths were obvious, but others remain well hidden. The big banks do not lend money since they are dead, the dirty little secret. Their insolvency is easy to prove, but obscured by altered accounting rules put in place on April 1st 2009.
They include generous rules that permit a dead entity to declare itself alive by filing a false accounting report, valuing their own assets at whatever suits their needs. Generally, insolvency plus illiquidity will force bankruptcy.
But Wall Street and the Big US Banks use naked shorting of USGovt-backed bonds to produce urgently needed liquidity. All the extreme efforts to revive the US banks are futile. Imagine numerous transfusions of a dead man in the Emergency Room of a hospital, as more blood does not guarantee a resuscitation. More wires and tubes don't mean squat, since the guy has croaked and his corpse is rotting with a stench spreading into the corridors.
The dirty secret, protected from the US public, is that the man died. So Wall Street and the Big US Banks are dead. By withholding the reality, a storm of funding programs has been approved by the USGovt, mostly directed at Wall
Street and the Big US Banks. They urgently need liquidity, and are creative how they obtain it.
US Government 'hiding true amount of debt.'
CBO
IMF