A Disaster or a Historical Calamity?

“It’s what Donald Rumsfeld would call a known unknown,” Matthew O’Brien writes.

“We know that we don’t know what would happen if we don’t raise the debt ceiling before we run out of cash to pay all our bills on time. It might ‘only’ crush consumer confidence, send markets cliff-diving, and slow down our already slow recovery — if not push us back into recession. Or it might be a historic blunder that not only flattens the economy today, but also forever raises our borrowing costs and lowers our standard of living tomorrow. So the stakes are fairly high. We just don’t know how high.”