US may finally breach the debt limit. Here’s why that’d be bad

The fight over the debt limit is renewing debates about what the actual consequences would be if the US were unable to borrow money to pay its bills

The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives has Washington and Wall Street bracing for a revival of brinkmanship over the nation’s statutory debt limit, raising fears that the fragile US economy could be rattled by a calamitous self-inflicted wound.

For years, Republicans have sought to tie spending cuts or other concessions from Democrats to their votes to lift the borrowing cap, even if it means eroding the world’s faith that the United States will always pay its bills. Now, back in control of a chamber of Congress, Republicans are poised once again to leverage the debt limit to make fiscal demands of President Joe Biden.

The fight over the debt limit is renewing debates about what the actual consequences would be if the United States were unable to borrow money to pay its bills, including what it owes to the bondholders who own US Treasury debt and essentially provide a line of credit to the government.

Read | US national debt crosses $31 trillion for first time

Some Republicans argue that the ramifications of breaching the debt limit and defaulting are overblown. Democrats and the White House — along with a variety of economists and forecasters — warn of dire scenarios that include a shutdown of basic government functions, a hobbled public health system and a deep and painful financial crisis.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy signalled this week that he and his fellow Republicans would seek to use the debt limit standoff to enact spending cuts and reduce the national debt. He said that lawmakers likely have until summertime to find a solution before the United States runs out of cash, a threshold that is known as “X-date.”

“One of the greatest threats we have to this nation is our debt,” McCarthy said on Fox News on Tuesday evening, adding, “We don’t want to just have this runaway spending.”

Biden has repeatedly said that he will refuse to negotiate over the debt limit and that Congress must vote to raise it with no strings attached.

That has introduced the very real likelihood of a debt limit breach. “Fiscal deadlines will pose a greater risk this year than they have for a decade,” Goldman Sachs economists wrote in a note.

Here’s a look at what the debt limit is and why it matters.

What is the debt limit?

The debt limit is a cap on the total amount of money that the federal government is authorized to borrow to fulfill its financial obligations. Because the US runs budget deficits — meaning it spends more than it brings in through taxes and other revenue — it must borrow huge sums of money to pay its bills.

That includes funding for social safety net programmes, interest on the national debt and salaries for troops. While the debt ceiling debate often elicits calls by lawmakers to cut back on government spending, lifting the debt limit does not authorise any new spending and in fact simply allows the US to finance existing obligations. In other words, it allows the government to pay the bills it has already incurred.

The date that the federal government can no longer fully meet its obligations on time is a moving target, but there are signs that it is approaching sooner than previously thought.

Analysts at Goldman Sachs expect the date to arrive around August. The Bipartisan Policy Centre, which closely tracks the debt limit deadline, projected last summer that the X-date would likely arrive no sooner than the third quarter of 2023. But those estimates have been thrown into flux by uncertainty over the Treasury Department’s cash flow, which could change depending on the trajectory of the economy and the fate of certain policies.

Shai Akabas, the director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Centre, said that the “the situation has deteriorated somewhat” from last June and that the actual X-date could now be “sometime around the middle of the year.”

What happens if US actually goes over that cliff? Just approaching a breach of the debt limit can hurt the economy. In 2011, congressional Republicans and President Barack Obama engaged in a standoff over spending and debt that was resolved just in time to avoid hitting the limit. That brinkmanship rattled investors, consumers and business owners, with concrete consequences.

Stock prices plunged — and volatility in the market spiked — as lawmakers approached a debt limit breach. They did not recover for half a year. The cost of borrowing for corporations, which fluctuates with the level of risk that investors perceive in the economy, jumped dramatically. That made it more expensive for companies to borrow to make new investments. Mortgage rates spiked similarly, hampering prospective homebuyers. The credit agency S&P downgraded America’s credit rating for the first time.

Consumer confidence and small-business optimism both plunged during the crisis as well.

An actual breach would be far worse, economists warn.

If the Treasury Department were unable to make payments to lenders who hold federal debt — what is known as a default — investors would demand much higher interest rates in the future to loan the government money. It would be similar to what happens when borrowers miss credit card payments; their credit ratings go down, and the interest rate they pay often goes up.

Such a scenario would add dramatically to the government’s interest payments, which the White House projects will cost the equivalent of 2.6 per cent of the total US economy over the next decade, further squeezing the federal budget. It would also threaten to destabilise bond markets globally because US Treasury bonds are largely seen as one of the safest investments in the world.

That spiral would likely occur even if the government maintains its payments to bondholders but is unable to pay other bills, like salaries for federal workers.

Perhaps most immediately damaging to an already fragile US recovery, the government would pull a huge amount of spending power out of the economy overnight if it breached the borrowing limit. By choosing not to pay some combination of Social Security checks, federal workers, bondholders and more, the government would be immediately killing the equivalent of one-tenth of US economic activity, Goldman Sachs analysts have estimated.

“It’s a large amount,” Alec Phillips, Goldman’s chief political economist, said last week. “You just take 10 per cent of the economy out of play for a bit until you resolve it.”

Researchers at Third Way, a Democratic think tank, estimated last month that a debt limit breach could kill up to 3 million jobs, add $130,000 to the cost of an average 30-year mortgage and balloon the national debt by an additional $850 billion.

Options to avoid catastrophe

In the past, Treasury officials have discussed trying to prioritise certain payments — like military salaries — or delaying payments entirely for a certain period until the government has sufficient revenue to cover all of its bills. Either scenario would cause chaos in the financial markets and set off legal challenges.

In late 2021, about a dozen officials in the department’s Office of Fiscal Projections were tracking the size and timing of the nation’s inflows and outflows of money to refine its estimates for the so-called X-date. They kept close tabs on fluctuations in non-marketable debt, such as savings bonds, and coordinated closely with government agencies to determine their spending needs.

Treasury officials also prepared for when they might have to conserve cash and suspend the daily reinvestment of Treasury securities held by the Exchange Stabilisation Fund, a pot of emergency money that is supposed to be used to intervene in currency markets during times of turmoil. That is the last step before the agency’s fiscal accounting manoeuvres, known as extraordinary measures, would likely be exhausted.

Containing that fallout from a default would initially be the responsibility of the Federal Reserve.

The central bank has a playbook for dealing with a debt ceiling breach that was laid out during conference calls and meetings in 2011 and 2013.

In August 2011, a previous congressional standoff had raised the possibility that the nation would fail to lift the debt limit and that the Fed would need to intervene to keep markets functioning.

Central bankers held a call to discuss what the Fed could do to rescue the financial system.

The options included treating defaulted Treasury bonds the same as bonds that have not defaulted when it came to Fed operations that purchased government debt or accepted it as collateral, “so long as the default reflects a political impasse and not any underlying inability of the United States to meet its obligations,” according to the transcripts.

The Fed also suggested that it could support money market mutual funds, as shorter-term debt markets faced widespread disruptions.

Most dramatically, the Fed’s staff suggested that the central bank could specifically purchase defaulted Treasury bonds, essentially paying off bondholders in a bid to keep markets functioning.

And it discussed buying defaulted bonds while selling off unaffected ones — although transcripts show that officials worried that “such an approach could insert the Federal Reserve into a very strained political situation and could raise questions about its independence from debt management issues faced by the Treasury.”

Jerome Powell, who is now the Fed’s chair, once called the possibility of purposely buying defaulted Treasury debt “loathsome.”

When the debt ceiling again emerged as a problem in 2013, Powell, who was then a Fed governor, worried that the central bank might make default more likely by advertising that it had a solid plan for dealing with one.

“If it actually looks like a good game plan, then it will make it less likely that the Congress will feel enough pressure to actually raise the ceiling,” he warned in a strategy call that October.

But he added, “I don’t want to say today what I would and wouldn’t do if we have to actually deal with a catastrophe on this.”

Could such crises be averted in the future? Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has dismissed the viability of theoretical ideas to raise the debt limit, such as minting a trillion-dollar coin.

However, she has called for abolishing the statutory debt limit entirely, warning that the borrowing cap was “destructive” to the US economy and arguing that it was blocking the federal government from spending money that Congress had already authorised.

Thus far, that recommendation has gone unheeded by Congress. Doing away with the debt limit, it seems, is even harder than raising it.