US Treasury Secretary Warns About Terrible Accident if Debt Ceiling Not Raised

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said Monday he worries that waiting until the last minute to raise the nation’s borrowing authority could result in an accident “that would be terrible.”

Last week, Lew said the U.S. debt ceiling will be exhausted Nov. 3, two days before previously estimated. In a letter to congressional leaders, he added that a remaining cash balance of less than $30 billion would swiftly deplete.

“Our best estimate is November 3rd is when we’ll exhaust what we call extraordinary measures; those are things we can do to manage things. I will run out of things that I can manage on November 3rd,” Lew told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
The federal government is scraping by just under its $18 trillion legal borrowing limit.

via CNBC

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Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza