Roubini doesn't mention this, but it's worth noting there's a geopolitical game of chicken playing behind the scenes: the banksters are desperate for cash. If they go to the Feds, the Feds will take ownership stakes and the game is up. If the banksters sell out to the SWFs and semi-peripheries -- at this point, the Bank of China alone could buy the US banking system with its lunch money -- the result is a political firestorm.
So our braindead ruling class is (1) cooking the books and hoping the rest of the world is too stupid to notice, (2) hoping the SWFs and semi-peripheries lend them a supertanker's worth of nickels and Congress won't notice, and (3) hoping the whole recession thing will just magically go away, because consumers won't notice silly little details like the loss of their jobs/cars/houses/401Ks and will instead start spending madly with money they don't have and credit they can't access because of the amazing miraculous magical power of hope.
In a nutshell: faith-based economics has been replaced by hope-based accounting.
-- DRR