UPDATE, as reported by the New York Times:

"WASHINGTON — With a budget deal still elusive and a deadline approaching on raising the debt ceiling, Speaker John A. Boehner has told colleagues that he is determined to prevent a federal default and is willing to pass a measure through a combination of Republican and Democratic votes, according to multiple House Republicans.

One lawmaker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Boehner had indicated he would be willing to violate the so-called Hastert Rule if necessary to pass a debt-limit increase. The informal rule refers to a policy of not bringing to the floor any measure that does not have a majority of Republican votes."

I'm not entirely sure what that means, but a statement by Boehner's press secretary sounds intriguing.

“The speaker has always been clear that a default would be disastrous for our economy. He’s also been clear that a ‘clean’ debt hike cannot pass the House. That’s why the president and Senate Democrats should drop their ‘no negotiations’ stance, and work with us on a plan to raise the debt limit in a responsible way, with spending cuts and reforms to get our economy moving again and create jobs.”

Note the word that is not there: ObamaCare.

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Everybody wants to know how this is going to end, particularly now that the shutdown appears to have become interwined with the far-more-risky debt-ceiling challenge, creating a mess on a scale that almost defies comprehension, let alone resolution.

As it happens, today is the anniversary of one plausible model for how it might end, and perhaps how it might not. Five years ago today, in the midst of the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression, the U.S. House of Representatives finally gave its approval to the Temporary Asset Relief Program, infamously known as TARP. A few hours later, it was signed into law by President George W. Bush.

Unpopular as TARP remains in some quarters today, economists are all but unanimous that the $700 billion bailout saved the global banking system from collapse and prevented the Great Recession from turning into something far, far worse. And as the Congressional Budget Office reported last year, in the end TARP's total cost to taxpayers turned out to be $24 billion, perhaps the best $24 billion this country has spent in a long, long time.

What we tend to forget, though, is just how close that rescue operation came to failure, and how close this country came to much bigger disaster. Let's take a little stroll down memory lane, shall we?

With Wall Street collapsing and panic spreading that fall, Bush summoned congressional leaders to his office on Sept. 25, 2008 to plead for their help in passing TARP. Without it, he warned them ominously, "This sucker could go down." In an iconic moment after the meeting, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson even got down on one knee, begging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her help.

"It’s not me blowing this up, it’s the Republicans,” Pelosi told him.

"I know, I know," Paulson replied.

On Sept. 29, the bill came before the House of Representatives. John Boehner, at the time the House minority leader, took to the well to make an impassioned appeal for its passage:

"These are the kind of votes that we have to look into our soul and ask ourselves, what is in the best interests of our country?" Boehner said, his voice beginning to crack with emotion. "... I believe that we have to vote for this bill and do our very best to keep ourselves from the brink of an economic disaster that will harm all of our constituents. So I ask all of you, on both sides of the aisle: What's in the best interest of our country? Not what's in the best interest of our party, not what's in the best interest of our re-election. What's in the best interest of our country. Vote yes."

House Republicans voted no, and they did so by more than a two-to-one margin. As a result, the bill fell short of passage by 24 votes. The reaction was harsh.

The next day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 777 points, the single largest point drop in the history of the stock market, making $1.2 trillion in perceived wealth just vanish. Attempting to restore confidence, the Senate rushed through a vote in favor of TARP, sending the bill back to the House for reconsideration.

On Oct. 3, a majority of Republicans again voted no, but this time the 91-108 margin within the GOP was close enough to allow a strong surge of support from Democrats to pass the bill and send it to Bush's desk for a hasty signature, averting the crisis.

Today, five years later, we stand again at a dangerous precipice. The Dow has fallen more than 700 points since mid-September. The Treasury Department today released a report on the consequences of failing to raise the debt ceiling, warning that "it could have a catastrophic effect on not just financial markets but also on job creation, consumer spending and economic growth, with many private-sector analysts believing that it would lead to events of the magnitude of late 2008 or worse."

The Chamber of Commerce has sent letters to every member of Congress, urging them to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling. Top CEOs also met with President Obama yesterday at the White House to express their support for raising the ceiling. 

"You can litigate these policy issues, you can relitigate these policy issues in a political forum," Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein said afterward, "but you shouldn’t use the threat of causing the U.S. to fail on its obligations to repay the debt as a cudgel."

Some people continue to believe that when crunch time comes, Republicans in Congress will respond to pleas from their corporate and Wall Street financial backers and relent by raising the debt ceiling. I think that's foolish optimism. They certainly didn't relent five years ago in a time of crisis, and today's GOP caucus is far more reactionary and petulent than it was then. Roughly half of Boehner's fellow House Republicans came to Washington after the TARP vote; they are the sons and daughters of the Tea Party.

It is very likely that only the fear of severe and immediate economic dislocation can force House Republicans to back away from their unreasonable demands, and I'm not convinced they will do so even then. In the past, Boehner has spoken repeatedly of the disasters that would ensue if the debt ceiling is not raised, but his influence over his members may be less today than it was five years ago, when two-thirds of his fellow Republicans rejected his appeal for sanity. His willingness to act in the interests of the country, rather than party, seems compromised as well.

That's not a very sunny outlook, I admit.