Benjamin Wittes: “I’ve heard a lot of hand-wringing over the last few years about the possibility of a Chinese—or other—cyber attack on the American financial sector. I take those threats pretty seriously. But here, in slow motion and altogether in plain sight, is a real live attack of catastrophic proportions on our banking and financial system that is actually unfolding and absent congressional action will come to fruition starting tomorrow.”

“It is an attack, among other things, on the jugular of precisely that feature of the system that binds the whole thing together: Confidence. Yet we talk about it in the staid language of political punditry. Can speaker Boehner get his caucus together? Can the bipartisan Senate leadership pass a compromise package? There comes a point at which this is no longer the right vocabulary.”

Crossposted from Wonk Wire.