Offline
limit agreement isn’t reached !!
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen today warned of the widespread global effects that could be felt if the federal government exhausts extraordinary measures and fails to raise the debt ceiling, telling Christiane Amanpour about
the ways everyday Americans could face stark consequences.
Yellen’s warning comes after the United States on Thursday hit its $31.4 trillion debt limit set by Congress,forcing the Treasury Department to start taking extraordinary measures to keep the government paying its bills.While those newly deployed extraordinary measures are largely behind-the-scenes accounting maneuvers,
Yellen told Amanpour that “the actual date at which we would no longer be able to use these measures is quite uncertain, but it could conceivably come as early as early June.
”Speaking exclusively from Senegal, Yellen said that after the measures are exhausted, the US could experience at a minimum downgrading of its debt as a result of Congress failing to raise the debt ceiling. The effects of the federal government failing to make payments, she argued, could be as broad as a “global financial crisis.”“If that happened, our borrowing costs would increase and every American would see that their borrowing costs would increase as well,”
Yellen said. “On top of that, a failure to make payments that are due, whether it’s the bondholders or to Social Security recipients or to our military, would undoubtedly cause a recession in the US economy and could cause a global financial crisis.
”“It would certainly undermine the role of the dollar as a reserve currency that is used in transactions all over the world. And Americans – many people would lose their jobs and certainly their borrowing costs would rise,” she continued.Yellen wrote a letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Thursday explaining the measures being taken, escalating pressure on Capitol Hill to avoid a catastrophic default