Even if the shutdown is resolved, though, investors have a bigger concern on their minds: namely, the possibility that Republicans might actually refuse to raise the nation’s debt ceiling in a couple of weeks. The ceiling is the legal limit on the amount of money that the government is allowed to borrow, and raising it is necessary not just to keep the government running in the future but to allow it to pay for obligations it’s already incurred. As Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson convincingly showed last year, the 2011 imbroglio over the debt ceiling put a significant dent in both business and consumer confidence, held back hiring, and further weakened the recovery. It also sent the stock market tumbling—even though a debt-ceiling deal was eventually reached, the Dow fell almost fourteen per cent in less than a month during the crisis, in part because it made people realize that a U.S. default was no longer unthinkable. (It also led to the first
Posted on: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 17:34:53 +0000
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