Is averting a U.S. debt default still possible? Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen predicted a shorter countdown to a possible catastrophic default.
President Biden is to meet with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) next Tuesday, but there are still seemingly irreconcilable — negotiating positions.
“If you need to hear again that it’s your responsibility to address the debt ceiling without conditions and a ransom, then he can say that again,” a senior Biden administration official told Politico about the upcoming meeting.
“President Biden has refused to do his job — threatening to bumble our nation into its first-ever default — and the clock is ticking,” McCarthy said in response to Yellen’s warning that the U.S. may be unable to pay its bills “potentially as early as June 1.”
The New York Times reports that top Biden officials are privately debating invoking the 14th Amendment, which some legal scholars say requires the federal government to pay its debts.
This will of course have legal challenges — and could spook the markets.
Yellen previously has characterized invoking the 14th Amendment or minting a trillion-dollar coin as unserious options — but that may be better than the economy defaulting on its debt.
House Democrats have been working on a “discharge petition” that could force a clean debt-ceiling hike to be brought to the floor with 218 votes — meaning all Democrats and five Republicans.
Some Senate Republicans have reluctantly expressed openness to a 30-day debt limit extension, an acknowledgment that a deal is highly unlikely to materialize in the next month. Members of leadership are opposed to kicking the can down the road.
“If everybody starts thinking we can get an extension, then the crisis won’t happen until the end of that extension,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.).
I always wonder why nobody ever asks why we have a debt crisis in the first place, and why nobody ever wonders why we even bother to have debt ceilings, when they are not debt ceilings at all, given how easy it is to keep raising the debt limit, which like a credit card limit, is always reached, with another debt ceiling crisis to hand, as is the case now, and as has been the case so many times in my life, at least.
In this case, we have a debt crisis because the treasury is taking in less receipts, the federal reserve is no longer making submissions to the treasury because it is in technical default, and Joe Biden is spending money hand over fist like a drunken sailor without any regard whatsoever to what was budgeted, which makes a mockery out of the term “budget,” as we clearly see in this Reuters article titled “Increased green tax-credit costs are a sign of success, White House’s Podesta says” by Andy Sullivan
MAY 2, 2023
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A top White House official said on Tuesday that he was not concerned that President Joe Biden’s signature clean-energy law could cost more than originally anticipated as businesses take advantage of tax breaks that aim to spur green development.
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In other words, people, to the Democrats and Joe Biden, and his lackeys and stooges, the budget is a NOTHINGBURGER term, which raises the question of why all these meaningless budget negotiations on-going in Washington, which takes us back to Reuters, as follows:
“I think this is evidence that the bill was actually working, that people are making plans, they’re investing money,” John Podesta, a White House adviser who is overseeing implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, said in a Reuters interview.
Podesta’s comments signaled that the White House is not interested in scaling back the law as Biden girds for a budget showdown with Republicans.
Podesta and other administration officials have celebrated a wave of battery plants, solar facilities and other green-energy projects that have been announced since the law’s passage.
Congress’ nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimated last week that the law’s tax incentives will cost $515 billion over 10 years, up from its estimate of $270 billion at the time of passage.
A separate analysis by University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found they would cost $1.045 trillion over the coming 10 years, nearly three times its original $385 billion estimate.
And as this life-long political stooge and partisan lackey John Podesta, a Biden White House adviser who is overseeing implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which act does nothing to reduce inflation and everything to cause inflation, touts all his new battery plants that are being funded with taxpayer dollars in the form of tax credits, which are driving down corporate tax receipts at the treasury, so that on Thursday of this last week, Janet “TOODLES” Yellen, Joe’s stooge in the Treasury Department, was forced to have to auction roughly $95 billion in short-term debt at record-high interest rates, with the yield on the one-month T-bill on Friday at 5.447% after earlier rising to 5.739%, a record high, let’s go to a Reuters article titled “Albemarle cuts annual profit forecast on softening lithium prices” by Ernest Scheyder on May 3, 2023, where we have something happening that shouldn’t be happening what with all of these new battery plants Joe and John Podesta are building with taxpayer money to make the batteries to power Joe’s INSANE GREEN DREAM, where even our military has gone GREEN with battery-powered M1 Abrams tanks, and battery-powered Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles, and helicopters and even jet planes, to wit:
May 3 (Reuters) – Lithium producer Albemarle Corp cut its annual profit forecast on Wednesday despite posting a better-than-expected quarterly earnings, citing softening prices for the metal used to make electric vehicle batteries.
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SOFTENING PRICES?
But that can’t be with all the lithium demand John Podesta and Joe Biden are creating here!
There must be a typo in that article, or maybe Lithium producer Albemarle Corp is simply confused.
Let’s go back to Reuters to see what more we can see:
Shares of the Charlotte, North Carolina-based company fell 4.5% to $165.19 in after-hours trading.
Concern has grown across the lithium industry this year that weakening spot prices in China could spread elsewhere.
While some producers, most notably Livent Corp, have been able to weather the weak prices due in part to their reliance on long-term contracts, Albemarle said it was being affected and had to trim its expectations for the rest of the year.
For the year, Albemarle cut its sales forecast to a range of $9.8 billion to $11.5 billion, from a prior forecast of $11.3 billion to $12.9 billion.
The adjusted earnings forecast was trimmed to a range of $3.3 billion to $4 billion, from a prior $4.2 billion to $5.1 billion.
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So what is up with that, people?
Something to think about, anyway.
Could it be because people don’t like electric cars, and so, aren’t buying them, especially when being pushed to do so by Joe Biden and his coterie of lackeys and lickspittles and toadies?
Stay tuned!