Balloon Payments?

"Please bear in mind that the Federal Reserve is only one arrow in the quiver that can be deployed to restore the nation's economic vitality. The power to stimulate activity through taxing and spending the American people's money lies with the Congress of the United States.

"All eyes have been on the stimulus package recently passed by the House and Senate and signed by President Obama. This was no easy task, and it was accomplished with unusual alacrity. Only time will tell if the stimulus will give our economic engine an activating short-term jolt without encumbering or disincentivizing the entrepreneurial dynamic that has made for the long-term economic miracle that is America.

"Next, our political leaders must agree to the funding, if any, of the Treasury's proposals for the resolution of the banking crisis so as to make the system more stable and viable—a resolution, as Thomas Friedman reminds us in Sunday's New York Times, that needs to be done in a manner that encourages winners rather than 'bailing out losers.'

"And, on top of all that, they must begin, now, to dig us out of the very deep hole they themselves have dug in incurring unfunded liabilities of retirement and health care obligations—programs that are already on the books but have not yet been paid for—that Pete Peterson's foundation calculates at $56 trillion and we at the Dallas Fed believe total over $99 trillion.

"If you do the numbers, you will find that some 85 percent of those unfunded liabilities is due to Medicare; a budgetary Heimlich maneuver is urgently needed to keep Medicare from choking off our economic prosperity." -- Richard W. Fisher, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Feb. 23, 2009

Italics ours.