Remember the debt ceiling? Thought that was all squared away over the summer by the Budget Control Act and the creation of the super committee? Maybe not.
There is a chance – and not a comfortably small one – that another debt-ceiling fight could rear its sure-to-be ugly head before the November 2012 election. The super committee could mitigate the risk by agreeing to $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction, but a lack of progress toward any deal at all means that’s unlikely.
“We don’t hit the debt ceiling until after the election, assuming the economy doesn’t crash and assuming that Europe doesn’t pull us back down,” said Ethan Pollack, a fiscal policy expert at the Economic Policy Institute. But if there’s a recession, Pollack said, “there’s a very good chance" the United States would hit its $15.2 trillion debt ceiling before the end of 2012.