What are they waiting for? They should have printed 14 trillion extra dollars years ago so we could be debt free today. We could have totally avoided this whole debt ceiling crisis.
Printing money? That's common knowledge that every investor/country who has ever bought government debt knows and expects, it's why it's treated as virtually risk-free.
The fact that there were people in our government who actually saw default as an option is what has caused this whole unnecessary disaster.
I guarantee you no one is expecting US to go into hyper inflation. You're a fucking moron if you think that no biggie we can keep on running up a deficit forever because everyone is expecting us to print some dough when the time comes. While I agree that this "disaster" could have been avoided, the longer term problem is the biggest issue here, and that hasn't been addressed at all.