Enter
LOOKING FORWARD
IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON
10.20.13
WILLIAM B. PLOWMAN/NBC/NBC NEWSWIRE
ment to bondholders, the consequences could be severe. “A
default would be unprecedented and has the potential to be
catastrophic,” warns Treasury.
“Credit markets could freeze,
the value of the dollar could
plummet, U.S. interest rates
could skyrocket, the negative
spillovers could reverberate
around the world, and there
might be a financial crisis and
recession that could echo the
events of 2008 or worse.”
That leads us to a second
camp of debt ceiling deniers: the
ones that truly believe that all
this talk of default is just not
true, prioritization or no, and
that nothing is at stake with
regards to the global economy.
This camp includes people like
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.),
who told “CBS This Morning,”
“I would dispel the rumor that
is going around that you hear on
every newscast that if we don’t
raise the debt ceiling we will
default on our debt. We won’t.”
There’s also Senator Ted Cruz
(R-Texas), who says, “Will the
U.S. default on its debt? ... The
answer is of course not.”
And Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Texas)
This is some extreme
cognitive dissonance here.
The debt ceiling has not,
actually, been historically used
as a leverage point to rein
in the executive branch.”
(R-Fla.) truly exists in a world of
his own. He won’t vote to raise
the debt ceiling, because, as the
Washington Post reports, he
thinks “’it would bring stability
to the world markets,’ since they
would be assured that the United States had moved decisively
to curb its debt.”
But what makes all of this truly
surreal isn’t just the fact that
some of these people believe that
there are no consequences to a
debt ceiling breach. It’s that all of
these people are supposed to be
When
questioned
on the
possibility of
U.S. default,
Sen. Ted Cruz
(R-Texas)
echoes
Coburn: “...of
course not.”