US President Joe Biden announced on Monday that “everything went well” during a telephone call with Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy regarding “debt ceiling” talks.
Back at the White House, Biden said, in response to a question about his previous phone call with McCarthy, that “it went well … and we’ll talk tomorrow.”
And the White House announced that “Biden and McCarthy aides met at 6:00 pm Sunday Washington time to discuss remaining issues, on the condition that Biden and the Speaker of the House meet tomorrow.”
This came after Biden’s call for Republicans to abandon their “partisan” terms and “extreme” stances on stalled negotiations to raise the US national debt ceiling.
For her part, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen reiterated that the US will not last until mid-June unless the government finds a way out of the deadlock with the national debt ceiling.
“I can see that the chances of holding out until June 15, when we can pay all of our obligations, are very small,” Yellen told NBC.
In January, the US national debt reached $31.381 trillion, and now the White House is asking Congress to raise this limit without any conditions, but the House of Representatives, controlled by the Republican majority, links the move with spending cuts. .
And raising the debt ceiling is a legislative maneuver that allows the world’s largest economy to keep paying its creditors and the wages of its workers. The debt ceiling was set at $31 trillion, a record for all sovereign debt in the world. Republicans condition the agreement on raising the debt ceiling in exchange for budget cuts.
A similar situation faced by the United States in the era of Barack Obama in 2011 led to a downgrade of their credit rating.
The current situation is causing many fluctuations in the markets and if the stalemate continues beyond June 1, the United States will find that it will not pay its debts, bills and salaries, and therefore this will be the first time that US Treasury bond holders are unable to recoup their investments. .
Therefore, the White House argues that if the recovery period, which the president attributes to himself, ends, the markets will collapse, the recession will become historic, and unemployment in the US will rise strongly with consequences for the entire global economy.
Source: RT