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Canadians ignore the U.S. debt-ceiling standoff at their own peril
Commentators have cried wolf about debt ceilings and fiscal cliffs so often that Canadians can be forgiven for ignoring the latest confrontation brewing between President Barack Obama and Congress. But that would be a mistake.A perfect storm (to mix metaphors) of three separate fiscal and legislative crises is converging on Washington. Unless the administration and Congressional leaders can find a way to disperse that storm, the United States government could default on its debt, be forced to cut a trillion dollars from spending or simply shut down. The price of staving off any one of these disasters may be allowing one of the others to happen. And that would be very bad news for the Canadian economy. Over the past few years, the Americans have punted a series of debt and spending deadlines time and time again. Now all the deadlines are arriving at once. On March 1, sequestration kicks in, the first tranche of $1.2-trillion (U.S.) over nine years in mandatory spending cuts half of them to Defence unless Congress and the administration can find another way to rein in the U.S. governments trillion-dollar annual deficits. Posted by: tipper 2013-01-15 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=360126 |