Obama's Dinner-Party Diplomacy Will Lead Nowhere

Call it the sea-bass bubble: President Barack Obama takes 12 Republican senators out to dinner, and all of a sudden Washington has its hopes up for a big fiscal deal.

Don't bet on it. Obama and the Republicans both have political incentives to act like they are working hard on a deal to replace sequestration, provide fiscal policy certainty and maybe even reform the tax code. In fact, the odds of a permanent fiscal deal have gone way down in recent months because both sides have already gotten much of what they want, and there is an absence of any market pressure to do more. Without clear political or economic motivation for a deal, this attempt to find a grand bargain will fail, as previous ones did.