There is no genuine "risk" of default... would be done only if it presumed to give political advantage. Claims of "not raising the debt ceiling would lead to a catastrophic default" are total BS... more government LIES! Hideous as our national debt is, the interest on it is still covered 12:1 by tax receipts. To prevent default, all they have to do is "pay the interest first"... the items to then be "defaulted upon" would be social spending... and of course the DemoCraps will never want to do THAT.
If there is a default it will be done intentional by Obama just to make a point. We take in plenty of money to pay debt service. That CNBC article is just more GE propaganda.
All a technical debt default would do is serve to piss off USA's creditors. I don't know about you, but if I owe a bank a lot of money, I wouldn't start making late payments just to "prove a point". On the other hand, the USA clearly has a debt problem and has for a long time. To this point, nothing has been done about it. Perhaps this is what is needed to finally get some action? I find it extremely sad and disgusting that USA politicians cannot find any middle ground on this debt issue, and need to resort to default just to get action. They are all Americans, you'd think somebody somewhere would be able to work together to avoid default, and avoid increasing the debt load.
A tax is collected for social security and medicare. Virtually all of the debt is due to excessive military spending, over compensation of federal employees ( federal employees make more than twice as much in salary and benefits as private sector employees), and bailouts of not just the finance sector but also government contractors ( probably 85% or more of gov't contracts are over budget on a per unit basis with respect to the original contract with the government's bailing out the contractors by constantly reworking the contracts so they are profitable to the contractor and not cancelling them). Since soc sec and medicare have combined to run a surplus of at least $1T, NONE of the current debt is due to those two programs combined. It should be no surprise that politicians never mention the three items I've listed above, which are responsible for virtually all of the debt, but always blame the two items (SocS and medicare) that have run a surplus.
Gives the people something to talk about. Nothing will actually happen. 1) There have been a number of government shutdowns in the past due to debt ceiling issues; there is no discernable pattern in their effect on markets. Certainly not on interest rates. 2) The treasury decides whether a technical default is necessary, not the GOP. It's almost unthinkable that they would decide that it is. 3) A government shutdown standoff never lasts because even republicans cannot do without (albeit democratic) government for too long and their base will get upset (that they can't use government services they take for granted) and it won't be politically profitable anymore to drag out the issue. Nothing to see here.
Exactly. But with even more nothing than that. This situation has plenty of empty posturing and other posturing that is full of it. Neither republicans nor democrats are ready to engage in the sort of brutal cuts that are needed. If they did engage in this, they'd be absolutely slaughtered come election day. All the GOP wants to do is say "See? We went to the mat to cut government spending." Maybe even say how they shut down government just to get the token cuts we end up with.