Debt ceiling cost: $1.7 billion for Treasury bills – Aug. 1, 2011 http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/01/markets/debt_ceiling_treasury_bills/index.htm?hpt=hp_t2

To be precise

the extra cost is $1,721,250,000 more in interest payments than the government would have needed to pay investors just two weeks ago, when they were willing to accept far lower rates before the debt ceiling became a crisis. “That’s real money,” said IHS Chief Economist Nariman Behravesh. “Taxpayers need to wake up to the fact that these kind of shenanigans in the end cost.”

I loved that he used the same exact word I did today to describe this whole debacle.

I hate that this is story is true, and that the people who caused this mess, still do not seem to grasp what it meant, and will continue to mean, to the rest of the world economy. 

If you think this the last if it, you have no idea how this stuff works.  Thousands of very wealthy folks just got the crap scared out of them.  Their financial advisors will do what it takes to make sure it doesn’t happen again. 

Oh, by the way. We get to do this whole debt hostage crisis farce again in six months after the new debt commission deadlocks over taxes (again), and triggers another round of massive cuts or another “crisis”.