After a month of high drama the Senate at high noon today voted to pass a bill to raise the debt ceiling. How to evaluate this outcome? If I must give a one-word verdict, it would be “good.” If I can expand to two words, it would be “not good.” If I can elaborate to 20 words: “The legislation confirms the sorry state of our public deliberations, but it is probably the best that could be hoped for,” given where the negotiations were as the big hand on the clock approached twelve.
In the 1955 movie Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean and a teenage rival race two cars to the edge of a cliff in a game of chicken. Both intend to jump out at the last moment. But the other guy miscalculates, and goes over the cliff with the car.
This is the game that is being played out in Washington this month over the debt ceiling. The chance is at least 1/4 that the result will be similarly disastrous.
It is amazing that the financial markets continue to view the standoff with equanimity. Interest rates on US treasury bonds remain very low, 3% at the ten-year maturity. Evidently it is still considered a sign of sophistication to say “This is just politics as usual. They will come to an agreement in the end.” Probably they will. But maybe not. (I’d put a ½ probability on an agreement that raises the debt limit, but just muddles through in terms of the genuine long term fiscal problem. That leaves at most a ¼ probability of a genuine long-term solution of the sort that President Obama apparently proposed last week – described as worth $4 trillion over ten years.)
During much of the last decade, U.S. fiscal policy has been procyclical, that is, destabilizing. We wasted the opportunity of the 2003-07 expansion by running large budget deficits. As a result, in 2010, Washington now feels constrained by inherited debts to withdraw fiscal stimulus at a time when unemployment is still high. Fiscal policy in the UK and other European countries has been even more destabilizing over the last decade. Governments decide to expand when the economy is strong and then contract when it is weak, thereby exacerbating the business cycle.