Posts Tagged ‘Treasury’

Sen. Rand Paul yesterday introduced legislation and took to the Senate floor to call for a Senate vote of no confidence in Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Passage of the motion will indicate that the U.S. Congress has no confidence that Secretary Geithner will institute policies that will reverse the downgrade in America’s debt and our current economic insolvency. Immediate action on the no-confidence vote was blocked by Senate Democrats.

“The current Administration’s gross mismanagement of the U.S. economy, at the helm of which has sat Secretary Geithner through financial debacle and decline, must end now,” Sen. Paul said.

Read more by Thomas McAdam at Louisville.com

Vice President Biden mistakenly claimed Americans own 85% of U.S. Treasury securities during his visit to China. Americans own 54% of the U.S. public debt — that is, the amount of debt held by the public. They own 69% of the total debt, which includes money the U.S. government owes itself.

At several stops in China, Vice President Biden sought to reassure the Chinese that their investments in U.S. treasuries are safe. Biden’s reassurances — including his mistaken claim about how much of the Treasuries are owned by Americans — had been widely reported in the news media.

Read more by Eugene Kiely, Factcheck.org, in USA Today, 8/23/2011

BEIJING, Aug. 6 (Xinhua) — The days when the debt-ridden Uncle Sam could leisurely squander unlimited overseas borrowing appeared to be numbered as its triple A-credit rating was slashed by Standard & Poor’s (S&P) for the first time on Friday.

Though the U.S. Treasury promptly challenged the unprecedented downgrade, many outside the United States believe the credit rating cut is an overdue bill that America has to pay for its own debt addition and the short-sighted political wrangling in Washington.

Dagong Global, a fledgling Chinese rating agency, degraded the U.S. treasury bonds late last year, yet its move was met then with a sense of arrogance and cynicism from some Western commentators. Now S&P has proved what its Chinese counterpart has done is nothing but telling the global investors the ugly truth.

Read more at http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/indepth/2011-08/06/c_131032986.htm

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan on Sunday ruled out the chance of a US default following S&P’s decision to downgrade America’s credit rating.

“The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default” said Greenspan on NBC’s Meet the Press.

“What I think the S&P thing did was to hit a nerve that there’s something basically bad going on, and it’s hit the self-esteem of the United States, the psyche” said Greenspan.

By Patrick Allen, CNBC, 8/07/2011

Read more at http://www.cnbc.com/id/44051683

Hyperinflation, anyone?

Debate over the debt ceiling has reached a fever pitch in recent weeks, with each side trying to outdo the other in a game of political chicken. If you believe some of the things that are being written, the world will come to an end if the U.S. defaults on even the tiniest portion of its debt.

by Ron Paul, bloomberg.com, 7/22/2011

In strict terms, the default being discussed will occur if the U.S. fails to meet its debt obligations, through failure to pay either interest or principal due a bondholder. Proponents of raising the debt ceiling claim that a default on Aug. 2 is unprecedented and will result in calamity (never mind that this is simply an arbitrary date, easily changed, marking a congressional recess). My expectations of such a scenario are more sanguine.

The U.S. government defaulted at least three times on its obligations during the 20th century.

Read more at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-22/default-now-or-suffer-a-more-expensive-crisis-later-ron-paul.html