United States of Entropy

[AEON]

will fall just like Rome?

Rome didn't fall - it moved east and lasted another 1000 years...

 

[Pearl]

Are you suggesting we fire some missiles to regain our standing? I'm not sure I understand the argument that the US is "weaker" simply because we didn't bomb the hell out of Syria...

Weakness usually implies the lack of power/ability to do X. The US certainly has both, and chose not to use it. That's not weakness - that's strategy.

I never said that. I only posted that article to show what the rest of the world thinks of our government and how embarrassing it is.

Rome didn't fall - it moved east and lasted another 1000 years...

Yes, but some conservatives, like Pat Buchanan, often refer to the decline of Rome - the city itself - as America's future. My dad is a wacky conservative who eats up Buchanan's books and agrees with his comparison. I just find it funny that there are people out there (and sadly there are plenty) who believe our current decadence and multiculturalism will destroy us, as it did to Rome, but that is not the case here.

 

[nathan1977]

Yes - this is going to be a mess.

Perhaps someone like Nathan or INDY would be best at answering for the Republicans, as I am a supporter of the single-payer, universal coverage option.

I'm not sure what a "Republican" response would be. I can only speak for myself, and I'm not sure how to solve the problem of health care, which goes back *at least* to the 1970s, as documented by Michael Moore in SICKO.

I continue to believe that the structural inequalities of a free-market economy when applied to health-care don't work, because no matter which way you slice it, the sick and poor stay sick and poor.

People chafed at my citation of the NY Times article for its discussion of the ways in which the costs of buying into the ACA via Medicaid were too onerous. Here's another story that breaks down in even greater detail how Medicaid is usually the second or third largest expense for the states currently, and how the states will be forced in three years to carry a much larger financial burden, and for some states, those costs are untenable. (TX, for example, will have to pay an additional $2B over ten years to cover Medicaid costs, once they start paying "only" 10%.)

http://www.governing.com/news/federal/gov-some-states-balk-at-expanding-medicaid.html

Taxation alone will not solve the problem, because the core structural problems of a free market healthcare system whose costs balloon regularly are not being addressed. (It's no secret that insurance companies jacked up rates on their members over the past few years, as the ACA came closer -- so, while one poster may say that costs are slowing, that's only because they had been out of control in recent years.)

In any event, raising taxes on the poorest states to get them to pay for medical care will only force those states to cut other primary services. Raising taxes to cover the cost of another tax will, in essence, be a form of double taxation, particularly on the middle class, who will be most adversely affected, as they are most vulnerable to companies cutting back hours.

Again, no one is dealing with the structural inequities of cost. Instead, we have a system that is becoming increasingly unjust, and a government that is only throwing fuel on the fire. Something must be done, but the misnamed Affordable Care Act is not a solution. Someone needs to bring the health care industry in line.

 

[Headache in a Suitcase]

The United States of Intransigence

 

[Headache in a Suitcase]

I suppose some good can come from all of this. Perhaps the tea party will cause the republican party to self destruct from within, leading to a split between the moderate republicans and their psychotic brethren. That would be nice.

 

[nathan1977]

(TX, for example, will have to pay an additional $2B over ten years to cover Medicaid costs, once they start paying "only" 10%.)

My apologies. My numbers were erroneous.

TX will be expected to pay $27B over ten years starting in 2017.
That's $2.7B a year.
With a B.

 

[Irvine511]

And yet, some poorer, Republican states like Kentucky (far poorer than the 2nd most populated state in the country, Texas) think the expansion of Medicare and the ACA is good for their people, and also good for their economies.

It’s no coincidence that numerous governors — not just Democrats like me but also Republicans like Jan Brewer of Arizona, John Kasich of Ohio and Rick Snyder of Michigan — see the Affordable Care Act not as a referendum on President Obama but as a tool for historic change.

That is especially true in Kentucky, a state where residents’ collective health has long been horrendous. The state ranks among the worst, if not the worst, in almost every major health category, including smoking, cancer deaths, preventable hospitalizations, premature death, heart disease and diabetes.

We’re making progress, but incremental improvements are not enough. We need big solutions with the potential for transformational change.

The Affordable Care Act is one of those solutions.

For the first time, we will make affordable health insurance available to every single citizen in the state. Right now, 640,000 people in Kentucky are uninsured. That’s almost one in six Kentuckians.

Lack of health coverage puts their health and financial security at risk.

They roll the dice and pray they don’t get sick. They choose between food and medicine. They ignore checkups that would catch serious conditions early. They put off doctor’s appointments, hoping a condition turns out to be nothing. And they live knowing that bankruptcy is just one bad diagnosis away.

Furthermore, their children go long periods without checkups that focus on immunizations, preventive care and vision and hearing tests. If they have diabetes, asthma or infected gums, their conditions remain untreated and unchecked.

For Kentucky as a whole, the negative impact is similar but larger — jacked-up costs, decreased worker productivity, lower quality of life, depressed school attendance and a poor image.

The Affordable Care Act will address these weaknesses.

Some 308,000 of Kentucky’s uninsured — mostly the working poor — will be covered when we increase Medicaid eligibility guidelines to 138 percent of the federal poverty level.

PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Urban Studies Institute at the University of Louisville concluded that expanding Medicaid would inject $15.6 billion into Kentucky’s economy over the next eight years, create almost 17,000 new jobs, have an $802.4 million positive budget impact (by transferring certain expenditures from the state to the federal government, among other things), protect hospitals from cuts in indigent care funding and shield businesses from up to $48 million in annual penalties.

In short, we couldn’t afford not to do it.


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/opinion/my-state-needs-obamacare-now.html

It's a matter of political will. Read the whole thing.

 

[nathan1977]

(the 2nd most populated state in the country, Texas)

Do you think that this might have something to do with TX' expected costs of $2.7B a year for ten years?

have an $802.4 million positive budget impact (by transferring certain expenditures from the state to the federal government, among other things)

So the already-strapped federal government is going to absorb additional costs of close to a billion dollars -- and this just from KY alone?

Gotcha. Tell me how that makes the ACA actually affordable. 'Cause the plan of the KY governor (a Democrat, by the way) sounds like he's just kicking the can back to the broke federal government. There is no act of political or moral will in simply passing the costs on to a government that can't afford it. And this does nothing to address any of the issues relating to the cost of health care, or the fact that neither the government nor its poorest citizens can afford it.

 

[Irvine511]

I object to your characterization of a colossal nation-state like Texas -- which ranks 50th, btw, in citizens with health coverage -- as a poor, cash-strapped, rural, agrarian state.

I also object to the characterization of the federal government as "broke."

We can discuss what causes health care costs to rise, and we can discuss how much the ACA will help that or not, but we can't dispute the fact that it is an attempt to do something to bring the US up to par with the rest of the world while addressing costs.

 

[nathan1977]

I object to your characterization of a colossal nation-state like Texas -- which ranks 50th, btw, in citizens with health coverage -- as a poor, cash-strapped, rural, agrarian state.

Well that settles that. I guess I missed where I characterized the state that way?

 

[nathan1977]

I object to your characterization of a colossal nation-state like Texas -- which ranks 50th, btw, in citizens with health coverage -- as a poor, cash-strapped, rural, agrarian state.

I also object to the characterization of the federal government as "broke."

We can discuss what causes health care costs to rise, and we can discuss how much the ACA will help that or not, but we can't dispute the fact that it is an attempt to do something to bring the US up to par with the rest of the world while addressing costs.

Oh, I agree it's an attempt. However, it doesn't do anything to address costs, it simply absorbs them. And the fundamental problem with our government is that it has flung too much money that it can't afford at too many problems both foreign and domestic for too long without actually sitting down and figuring out how to actually address structural issues. We simply can't afford this anymore. It doesn't solve problems; at best it slows them, at worst it magnifies them.

 

[anitram]

Nowhere in any of nathan's posts do I see suggestions of what should be done. Which is sort of typical of the Republican approach to healthcare.

 

[nathan1977]

Nowhere in any of nathan's posts do I see suggestions of what should be done.

And I was very clear about that. This is a complicated issue with no easy solution, given the various factors that are at play. However, unlike Republicans, I'm not defending the current system either. I've been very clear about my belief that healthcare should not be subject to free market enterprise. And if there was a way to make health care free and universal, I'm all for it.

From what I've read, the public option may have been the best one. IMHO

 

[anitram]

The public option is yet another Democratic Party idea, in fact isn't that what Obama ran on in 2008? Again, it isn't the left that's deadset against that approach.

 

[nathan1977]

The public option is yet another Democratic Party idea, in fact isn't that what Obama ran on in 2008? Again, it isn't the left that's deadset against that approach.

It was, and then he started backing way off of it. It was present in the first version of the bill that came out of the House in 2009, but it eventually disappeared.

 

[anitram]

Because he concluded that it had no chance of passing. Wonder why.

 

[Irvine511]

Nowhere in any of nathan's posts do I see suggestions of what should be done. Which is sort of typical of the Republican approach to healthcare.

If we go back to the mid-1990s, the Republican suggestion was the individual mandate.

 

[Diemen]

It was, and then he started backing way off of it. It was present in the first version of the bill that came out of the House in 2009, but it eventually disappeared.

Do you think a Republican congress vehemently opposed to any form of healthcare reform touted by Obama (even one that originated from their side) might have something to do with that?

 

[nathan1977]

Do you think a Republican congress vehemently opposed to any form of healthcare reform touted by Obama (even one that originated from their side) might have something to do with that?

Given that the House had generated a bill that included a public option, I don't think the Republicans killed it. I think that the President got hit with intense lobbying from the Health Care lobby, which is why he eventually started talking publicly (and not a little defensively) about not wanting to kill the health care industry but only provide another option, and then started referring to the public option as just a sliver of the health care reform, and then eventually stopped pushing for it altogether.

 

[Pearl]

Anyone who remembers the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. little more than five years ago knows what a global financial disaster is. A U.S. government default, just weeks away if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling as it now threatens to do, will be an economic calamity like none the world has ever seen.

Failure by the world’s largest borrower to pay its debt -- unprecedented in modern history -- will devastate stock markets from Brazil to Zurich, halt a $5 trillion lending mechanism for investors who rely on Treasuries, blow up borrowing costs for billions of people and companies, ravage the dollar and throw the U.S. and world economies into a recession that probably would become a depression. Among the dozens of money managers, economists, bankers, traders and former government officials interviewed for this story, few view a U.S. default as anything but a financial apocalypse.

The $12 trillion of outstanding government debt is 23 times the $517 billion Lehman owed when it filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008. As politicians butt heads over raising the debt ceiling, executives from Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Warren Buffett to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Lloyd C. Blankfein have warned that going over the edge would be catastrophic.

“If it were to occur -- and it’s a big if -- one would expect a series of legal triggers, potentially transmitting the default to many other markets,” said Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive officer of Pacific Investment Management Co., the world’s largest fixed-income manager. “All this would add to the headwinds facing economic growth. It would also undermine the role of the U.S. in the world economy.”

The U.S. stock market lost almost half its value in the five months following Lehman’s failure. The country had its worst recession since the Great Depression (INDU), taking the global economy down with it. Unemployment (USURTOT) surged to 10 percent, the highest in three decades.

Another depression was prevented only by unprecedented action by the Federal Reserve, which pumped $3 trillion into the financial system. The U.S. Treasury provided about $300 billion of capital for the nation’s banks.

“If we miss an interest payment, that would blow Lehman out of the water,” said Tim Bitsberger, a former Treasury official under President George W. Bush and now a New York-based managing director at BNP Paribas SA. “Lehman was an isolated company, and now we are talking about the U.S. government.”

Buffett has asked politicians to stop using the debt limit as a weapon in policy debates. Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman urged employees to contact their congressmen to remind them about the “unacceptable consequences” of a default

“It should be like nuclear bombs, basically too horrible to use,” Buffett, 83, said in an interview published by Fortune magazine last week.

One unexpected consequence of Lehman’s collapse was the seizing up of the repurchase agreement, or repo, market -- a form of secured, short-term borrowing used by Wall Street banks and investment firms. Many of Lehman’s trading counterparts discovered the collateral they believed was backing their loans wasn’t there to grab as rules allowed. That scared investors in the rest of the market, closing off other trades and leading to fire sales of securities and further price declines.

A government default could freeze the repo market more than Lehman’s collapse because U.S. debt forms its backbone. At least $2.8 trillion of Treasuries serve as collateral for repo and reverse-repo loans, according to Fed data.

In the event of a default, Treasuries might no longer be eligible as collateral for repo agreements, according to James Kochan, Wells Fargo Funds Management LLC’s chief fixed-income strategist. The cheap funding for the holdings lowers the yields demanded on the investments, and unwinding the positions could amplify losses for lenders and borrowers.

If Treasuries were ejected from the market, “Well, holy cripes,” Kochan said in an interview.

In 2011, the last time Congress was gridlocked over the extension of the debt ceiling, repo rates rose as money-market funds pulled back because they didn’t want the risk of holding a security in default.

“A lot of this is about fear of the unknown,” said Scott Skyrm, a former head of repo and money markets for Newedge USA LLC and author of “The Money Noose: Jon Corzine and the Collapse of MF Global.” “There is no upside to being in the market in that environment, so people pull out.”

The U.S. didn’t default on its debt in 2011. Republicans and Democrats reached a last-minute deal to raise the borrowing limit. Even so, the posturing hurt consumer confidence and wiped out $6 trillion of value from global stocks.

While none of the people interviewed for this story expect the world’s largest economy to default this time either, most say the chances of it happening now are higher than in the past.

“It would be insane to default, but it’s no longer a zero-percent probability,” said Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund who teaches economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a columnist for Bloomberg View.

The U.S. hasn’t defaulted since 1790, when the newly formed nation deferred until 1801 interest obligations on debt it assumed from the states, according to “This Time Is Different,” a history of financial crises by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.

In 1979, the U.S. was late to make payments on about $122 million of bills, in part because of “severe technical difficulties” that the Treasury said stemmed from a word-processing failure, according to the Financial Review’s August 1989 issue. While payments were made after a short delay, including with interest for tardiness, the hiccup caused yields to rise by half a percentage point and stay there for months.
A default today could be deemed “technical” because it would be the result of the government’s unwillingness to pay, not its ability, JPMorgan Chase & Co. analysts including Alex Roever said in a report last week.

In a technical default, only the prices of Treasury bonds that mature or have coupon payments would fall, according to the analysts. Money-market funds wouldn’t be forced to sell government bonds, and the Fed probably would continue accepting them as collateral for emergency cash.

That distinction is nothing more than an effort to downplay the danger of default, according to MIT’s Johnson. Sovereign defaults are always about the political will to pay because most governments can print money to make payments if they want to, Johnson said.

Labeled technical or not, a default is still a default, said Jim Grant, founder of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer.

“People have typically turned to Treasuries as a safe haven, but what will happen when they realize it’s not safe anymore,” said Grant, who has followed interest rates since the 1970s. “Financial markets are all confidence-based. If that confidence is shaken, you have disaster.”

Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew has said the government will have only $30 billion of cash left by Oct. 17 to meet its commitments. Those can run as high as $60 billion a day, which means the Treasury will need to borrow more to meet its liabilities, Lew said. Goldman Sachs expects the Treasury’s cash balance to be depleted by Oct. 31 and “possibly quite a bit sooner,” analysts at the bank wrote in an Oct. 5 report.

The Treasury has $120 billion of short-term bonds coming due on Oct. 17, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. An additional $93 billion of bills are due on Oct. 24. On the last day of the month, $150 billion needs to be paid back, including two-year and five-year notes that mature. The total due from Oct. 17 through Nov. 7 is $417 billion.

While some expect a 2013 default will drive up yields only on Treasury securities coming due, others including former Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman see a wider impact in bond yields, pushing up borrowing costs.

“That would be higher interest costs over some considerable period of time for the U.S. and for U.S. taxpayers,” said Altman, who’s chairman of New York-based investment bank Evercore Partners Inc.

The yield on 10-year U.S. bonds dropped to a two-month low of 2.58 percent on Oct. 3. While short-term bill rates and the cost to insure against a default have risen, volatility in Treasuries has fallen, a sign that investor confidence in the Federal Reserve’s bond-purchase program is outweighing worries over the budget battle.

Some point to Standard & Poor’s 2011 downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, which led to an increase in Treasury prices, not a drop. Even after the rating was lowered by one level to AA+ from AAA, investors continued buying U.S. government bonds as they flocked to safety, according to Joe Davis, chief economist at Vanguard Group Inc.

A downgrade to default rating would be different, said Peter Tchir, founder of New York-based TF Market Advisors. Investors, structured vehicles, collateral agreements, derivatives contracts and other trading covenants have ratings-based rules that could force the replacement of Treasuries in a trade or portfolio, he said.

“Once the system starts to break down related to settlement and payments, then liquidity disappears, as we saw after Lehman,” Tchir said. “Perhaps the things we’re worried about now will be fine after a U.S. default, but who knows what others will not be.”

Treasuries are among the most popular forms of collateral pledged at derivatives clearinghouses, including the one owned by CME Group Inc. (CME:US), the world’s largest futures market. Government agencies such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which use interest-rate swaps and derivatives to hedge mortgage portfolios, would be affected by a downgrade because it could lower their counterparty ratings and result in more collateral being demanded by trading partners.

“We can’t even imagine all the things that might happen, just like Henry Paulson couldn’t imagine all the bad things that might happen if he let Lehman go down,” said Bill Isaac, chairman of Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Bancorp and a former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., referring to the former U.S. Treasury secretary. “It would create chaos in financial markets.”

Higher borrowing costs could slow the housing recovery. If 30-year mortgage rates climbed to 6.5 percent from 4.5 percent, a borrower who can now afford the monthly payment on a $200,000 loan would only be able to take on about $160,000 of debt when buying a property, forcing down sale prices.

It would be “bad -- both for affordability and for consumer confidence,” said Jed Kolko, chief economist for Trulia Inc., an online property-listing service.

Banks would have to write down securities on their books that are losing value and face capital shortfalls, according to MIT’s Johnson.

“The government wouldn’t have the cash to rescue the banks this time either,” Johnson said.

About half of the U.S. debt is held by foreign governments, central banks and other overseas investors, according to Treasury data. A default would throw those holdings into question as well as the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, Johnson said. During the 2011 debt-ceiling scare, foreign investors shunned Treasury auctions for about three months, according to data compiled by JPMorgan.

China is the largest holder of U.S. Treasuries, with $1.3 trillion in July, according to Treasury data. Japan follows with $1.1 trillion.

Even if Treasury prices aren’t affected by a default, the damage in other markets could be devastating. U.S. stocks fell 7 percent in one day when Congress rejected the government’s bank-rescue package in 2008, before passing it a few days later.
The market shocks would be enough to tip the U.S. back into recession and drag the world economy down, according to Desmond Lachman, a fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute. The event could prove to be the trigger that reverses a weak and fragile recovery, said William Cunningham, head of credit portfolios for the investment arm of Columbus, Ohio-based Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. Lehman’s collapse was a similar spark, he said.

“Is this the straw among other things that tips an economy without drivers of growth back down into a negative spiral?” Cunningham said.

While a short-lived default might be fixed without major damage to the global economy, drawing a line between short and long isn’t easy, according to Evercore’s Altman.

“If you missed an interest payment by two hours, the markets might look entirely beyond that and forgive you,” Altman said. “If you miss an interest payment by two days, four days, six days, that’s a different story. It’s very difficult to be scientific about this.”

During the final days of Lehman Brothers, Wall Street firms set up war rooms to chart the potential impact of the firm’s demise and prepare strategies to cope with the consequences. Their scenarios, which focused on credit-default swaps, didn’t forecast the contagion that quickly spread after the bankruptcy.

Now, some banks are preparing contingency plans for a possible U.S. default, such as stocking retail branches with more cash, the New York Times reported last week. Those preparations might prove useless once again.

“Nobody knows what would happen if there were a default because the reality is there’s never been even a technical default in the U.S.,” said Russ Koesterich, chief investment strategist at BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager. “Everyone’s flying blind.”

A U.S. Default Seen as Catastrophe Dwarfing Lehman’s Fall - Businessweek

What pisses me off here is that the conservatives in this country will still blame Obama for all of this. Even if we go into default and our economy crashes again, it still will be all that "socialist Kenyan Muslim" Obama's fault. And sadly, there are too many people in this country with that mentality. I have family members and former classmates who think this way, and its sickening to read my Facebook feed and see their reactions to all of this. No one wants to make sense of this; they just want to hold on to their ideologies and fears.

 

[anitram]

^

The Tea Party has bitten off more than it can chew.

 

[Popmartijn]

A U.S. Default Seen as Catastrophe Dwarfing Lehman’s Fall - Businessweek

What pisses me off here is that the conservatives in this country will still blame Obama for all of this. Even if we go into default and our economy crashes again, it still will be all that "socialist Kenyan Muslim" Obama's fault. And sadly, there are too many people in this country with that mentality. I have family members and former classmates who think this way, and its sickening to read my Facebook feed and see their reactions to all of this. No one wants to make sense of this; they just want to hold on to their ideologies and fears.

Apparently, some Republicans think it's no big deal...
Republicans Downplay 'Default', Dismiss Debt Deadline - NationalJournal.com

Not only do some conservatives say Oct. 17 is an artificial deadline—"Nobody thinks we're going to default on Oct. 17th," said Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan.—but they also are attempting to narrowly define what would constitute default.

In interviews with more than a dozen GOP lawmakers, the Republicans rejected the notion that Washington could default on its debt unless a borrowing increase is approved before Oct. 17. For the United States to actually default, these Republicans argue, the Treasury Department would have to stop paying interest on its debts—something GOP lawmakers claim is inconceivable.

...

The assumption that the U.S. will honor all of its debts—and honor them on time—is the foundation for much of the global financial system, Bell argues. So the fundamental problem with the Republican position is that Treasury makes between 3 million and 5 million financial transactions a day, and if the federal government starts to pick and choose which it will honor, it will land the economy in chaos.

Many of the world's leading financial experts, who are watching the slow pace of negotiations in Washington with dread, agree.

"The government shutdown is bad enough, but failure to raise the debt ceiling would be far worse, and could very seriously damage not only the U.S. economy, but the entire global economy," IMF Director Christine Lagarde said Thursday.

Indeed, while Republicans and the White House might disagree over how to define a default, the world's markets are likely to see any missed payment as a signal of profound financial weakness in the United States, and react accordingly.

 

[Pearl]

All I can think now is what Tina Fey said on SNL during the 2000 election fiasco: "America is now cancelled." Just to make light on this.

 

[Pearl]

What happens if we breach the debt ceiling?

According to Morgan Stanley top economist Vincent Reinhart, the question becomes straightforward: Which law must the Secretary of the Treasury break?

In a column for DealBook, which is adapted from one of his notes to clients, he explains the choice facing Treasury Secretary Jack Lew:

If the Treasury is unwilling to stretch the definition of extraordinary measures, on the day that the Federal Reserve predicts that the Treasury will run out of cash in its account and the Treasury is bound by the debt ceiling, it suspends all payments and awaits instructions from the Treasury. As a result, the government’s principal economic officials will face the prospect of violating one of these three laws:

1. The Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917 that establishes the debt ceiling;
2. The Federal Reserve Act that prohibits the Fed from lending directly to the Treasury; or,
3. The 14th Amendment of the Constitution that holds that the debt of the United States government, lawfully issued, will not be questioned.

They have to break a law. At the end of the day, officials will avoid violating the Constitution by indicating that they have been given inconsistent instructions and are obeying the one with the most important precedent.

Basically in Reinhart's formulation, Lew will opt to break the debt ceiling law, citing constitutional obligations to continue servicing the debt.

And then of course we enter into level never-neverland with respect to the budget

MORGAN STANLEY ECONOMIST: If We Breach The Debt Ceiling, Jack Lew Must Decide Which Law To Break - Business Insider

 

[digitize]

Jack Lew has another option, from what I understand: to not pay for certain government activities (social security checks and the like?), but to prioritize interest on the debt above everything else. That would be absolutely terrible, but it would likely avoid the full-scale depression scenario of an actual default.

 

[Pearl]

It's all about the lesser of the two evils

 

[anitram]

I still think the likelihood of default is almost nil.

If it comes to that, the GOP will massively lose the 2014 elections. Do you think the corporate donors will give to a party that tanked their investments? Let's get real here.

 

[PhilsFan]

 

[digitize]

I still think the likelihood of default is almost nil.

If it comes to that, the GOP will massively lose the 2014 elections. Do you think the corporate donors will give to a party that tanked their investments? Let's get real here.

Agreed. But it's still insanity that Congress has let it get this close.

 

[Popmartijn]

Jack Lew has another option, from what I understand: to not pay for certain government activities (social security checks and the like?), but to prioritize interest on the debt above everything else. That would be absolutely terrible, but it would likely avoid the full-scale depression scenario of an actual default.

I'm not sure that's a viable option to avoid a depression.
From the article I quoted:

The assumption that the U.S. will honor all of its debts—and honor them on time—is the foundation for much of the global financial system, Bell argues. So the fundamental problem with the Republican position is that Treasury makes between 3 million and 5 million financial transactions a day, and if the federal government starts to pick and choose which it will honor, it will land the economy in chaos.