it's going to come at the beginning of 2013.
Both parties absolutely need to resolve it,
but neither party wants to be seen as the first to resolve it.
Neither party has any incentive to solve it a second before it's due,
so he said, December, you're just going to see lots of
angry negotiations, negotiations breaking apart,
reports of phone calls that aren't going well,
people saying nothing's happening at all,
and then sometime around Christmas or New Year's,
we're going to hear, "Okay, they resolved everything."
He told me that a few months ago. He said he's 98 percent positive they're going to resolve it,
and I got an email from him today saying, all right,
we're basically on track, but now I'm 80 percent positive
that they're going to resolve it.
And it made me think. I love studying
these moments in American history
when there was this frenzy of partisan anger,
that the economy was on the verge of total collapse.
The most famous early battle was Alexander Hamilton
and Thomas Jefferson over what the dollar would be
and how it would be backed up, with Alexander Hamilton