This may well be the week when the global financial markets say enough is enough to Washington’s preposterous partisanship. I mean, don’t these politicians realize what is really at stake here?

The sight of House Speaker John Boehner yet again storming out of the debt-ceiling and debt negotiations over the weekend was enough to make the sturdiest stomachs cringe. What in the world ever happened to accountability and responsibility? It was truly one of the most pathetic displays of petty politicking on record.

If you’d been told a few weeks ago that now, a week away from the deadline, they’d be back to square one, you would not have believed it, particularly with so-called leaders working round the clock. Most everyone I talk to refuses to believe that in their selfishness, these alleged leaders will actually allow the United States to lose its AAA rating for the first time ever.

As the clock ticks relentlessly, Republicans and Democrats claim they’ve begun work on different budget plans, in what is clearly an increasingly frantic search for a deal to raise the federal debt ceiling, even as both sides acknowledge that failure to agree could rock global financial markets this week.

Bill Daley, the White House chief of staff, told CBS television Sunday night with typical political shamelessness that indeed, “We may have a few stressful days coming up – stressful for the markets of the world and the American people.’’

On Sunday night, capping a fruitless weekend when the heat factor in Washington reached a record 118 degrees, Obama met with congressional Democratic leaders at the White House, while on Capitol Hill, John Boehner, the Republican House speaker, led a conference call to brief his members about the negotiations. The briefing was predictably short and without any substance.

They keep stating the obvious because there’s not much more to say. The Republican congressional leadership and the White House state that rapid agreement was needed to prevent a potential loss of confidence in U.S. assets, but continued to push their own solutions. Potential loss of confidence? Confidence is already down the drain.

Boehner, who will go down in history as the tea party wimp who could but wouldn’t, reiterated his support for a two-stage deal, with an initial stopgap agreement to reassure investors and more fundamental reform left until later. The ultraconservative bully (who probably applauded Norway’s Nazi attacks) knows Obama will reject any temporary measure, and so he threatens that Republicans will dance on their own.

Rethorically, Boehner asserts: “There is going to be a two-stage process. It is not physically possible to do all of this in one step”, he told the tea party channel, also known as Fox News.

Politicians like to think they always cover all the bases, and thus thus Boehner warned Republicans they had to be prepared to compromise because of the need to raise the debt ceiling by August 2, to avoid the risk of the U.S. defaulting on its debt.

Meanwhile, Obama’s government, which has repeatedly said that the president would veto a partial deal, said that a temporary fix risked a loss of confidence and a downgrade in the U.S. credit rating. So what’s new?

Over at the White House, Daley accused the Republicans of taking risks with the U.S. international standing. “It must be extended in a way that gives certainty to the economy through (2013), and not some short-term gimmick where we’re right back in this fix in six or eight months and the world looks at us once again and says ... these people can’t get their act together,” he told NBC.

Boehner claims, falsely, that the White House had walked away from a potential comprehensive compromise deal last week that would have raised US$800 billion in new tax revenue in return for deep spending cuts – an agreement that would have been unpopular with the tea party Republicans who reject all suggestions of higher taxes.

In the cusp of cynicism, Boehner claims he’s still ready, willing and able to make that deal, but acknowledged that reaching agreement will be difficult. Once again, it’s little more than trying to cover his back side.

Elsewhere, Treasury boss Tim Geithner denied the suggestion that the president reneged on the Boehner deal. “The president and the speaker got very close, but there was a whole range of things yet to be resolved at that point when the speaker pulled out on Friday,” Geithner told CNN.

The Financial Times points out that with markets also unnerved by the debt crisis in Greece threatening to spread across the eurozone, governments outside the U.S. “have been watching the wrangling in Washington with increasing alarm.”

“The irony of the situation at the moment ... is that the biggest threat to the world financial system comes from a few right-wing nutters in the U.S. Congress rather than the eurozone,” Vince Cable, UK business secretary and former chief economist for Shell, told the BBC on Sunday.

rmena@eleconomista.com.mx