Quote:
Originally Posted by jms62
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it's CRAZY. lol
no, the craziest thing is that a segment of congress has been able to shut the whole government down. this is supposed to be a democracy-not mob rule by a small portion of one party. and that's what this is-or a tantrum, thrown by a few with the mindset of 2 year olds. i can't get my wayyyyyyy. waaaaah. i don't know that i've ever been so disgusted with these people.
oh, and
randall and anyone else saying hitting the debt ceiling would be no big deal, please...read this:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opi...,6006376.story
an excerpt:
If the U.S. government starts defaulting on its obligations — any obligations — that confidence will be permanently shaken. And that has some very real, practical consequences.
The largest holders of U.S. treasuries are the Social Security system and the Federal Reserve. If government bonds are suddenly devalued, Social Security could find itself unable to pay retirees, and the assets that back the value of the dollar would evaporate. The third and fourth largest bond holders are the Chinese and Japanese governments. If their assets suddenly contract in value, the contagion would spread from the world's largest economy to the second- and third-largest. Many institutions are barred from trading in bonds issued by an entity in default, which means that pension funds, money market funds, bond funds and other investment funds would be required to dump their U.S. debt, causing its value to spiral downward even more.
For average Americans, that means the purchasing power of their dollars will collapse, and interest rates on everything from mortgages to credit cards would skyrocket — if any lending was going on at all. After Lehman Brothers defaulted on its obligations five years ago, the stock market lost half its value, lending froze and unemployment jumped above 10 percent. We still have not recovered. The treasury's outstanding debt is more than 20 times as great as Lehman's was. We avoided another Great Depression after Lehman only because the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury were able to take extraordinary action to shore up the financial markets. If the U.S. government is the one to default, there will be no one to save us.
The precise chain of events that would occur after a U.S. default is unknowable, both because it has never happened and
because it would be the single largest disruption of the financial markets imaginable. But there is near universal consensus among economists, global finance officials and the financial industry that it would foster world-wide catastrophe.Yet a sizable portion of the Republican caucus in Washington chooses simply not to believe any of it. They think the White House is bluffing or that the predictions of dire consequences are overblown. Sequestration wasn't the end of the world, they say, and neither so far has been the federal government shutdown — at least not for members of Congress, who continue to show up to work and get paid.