Stalemated Senate leaders awaited the opening of U.S. financial markets on Monday to see how investors would react to the stalled budget negotiations in Washington with the debt ceiling deadline just three days away.
Stock markets will open at 9:30 a.m. Eastern time, while U.S. bond markets are closed for the Columbus Day holiday. Foreign markets were mixed overnight, and U.S. futures were down, after a jump in markets on Friday that reflected hopes that a deal to end the two-week-old government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling was near.
Here’s a quick way to catch up on the week’s news, through some of our favorite photos.
But negotiations mostly foundered over the weekend, leaving the Treasury Department ever closer to exhausting its borrowing power and leaders in the Senate, House and White House seemingly unable — or unwilling — to bridge the political impasse.
“I’m ashamed, and I want to apologize to the American people,” Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) said in an interview about the standoff on CNN early Monday. “This is not what I signed up for.”
The entrenched dispute began with a battle over whether to link funding for the government to changes in President Obama’s signature Affordable Healthcare Act, but then morphed last week into a fight over extending the debt ceiling, which is the government’s ability to borrow money in order to pay for bills it has already incurred.
Two weeks into the federal government shutdown, with the possibility of an first-ever default looming ever closer, the disagreement now has expanded to include the issue of broader cuts in existing programs and changes to the mandatory curbs in spending known as the sequester.
The imminent threat of a first-ever default on the U.S. debt is sparking alarm among the world’s financial leaders, who met this weekend in Washington. Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warned on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that a failure by the United States to make scheduled payments to investors “would mean massive disruption the world over. And we would be at risk of tipping yet again into a recession.”
After talks broke down between President Obama and House leaders late last week, GOP senators quickly cobbled together a plan to end the government shutdown and raise the $16.7 trillion debt limit.
But Senate Democrats, emboldened by deep divisions among House Republicans and poll data showing the GOP bearing the brunt of the blame for the impasse, rejected the GOP Senate plan brokered by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), because it would allow a new round of sequester cuts to take effect in January.
On Sunday, Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) was pressing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to accept a quicker deadline on a temporary measure to fund federal agencies and reopen the government and a longer deadline for raising the debt limit,
Stock markets will open at 9:30 a.m. Eastern time, while U.S. bond markets are closed for the Columbus Day holiday. Foreign markets were mixed overnight, and U.S. futures were down, after a jump in markets on Friday that reflected hopes that a deal to end the two-week-old government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling was near.
Here’s a quick way to catch up on the week’s news, through some of our favorite photos.
But negotiations mostly foundered over the weekend, leaving the Treasury Department ever closer to exhausting its borrowing power and leaders in the Senate, House and White House seemingly unable — or unwilling — to bridge the political impasse.
“I’m ashamed, and I want to apologize to the American people,” Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) said in an interview about the standoff on CNN early Monday. “This is not what I signed up for.”
The entrenched dispute began with a battle over whether to link funding for the government to changes in President Obama’s signature Affordable Healthcare Act, but then morphed last week into a fight over extending the debt ceiling, which is the government’s ability to borrow money in order to pay for bills it has already incurred.
Two weeks into the federal government shutdown, with the possibility of an first-ever default looming ever closer, the disagreement now has expanded to include the issue of broader cuts in existing programs and changes to the mandatory curbs in spending known as the sequester.
The imminent threat of a first-ever default on the U.S. debt is sparking alarm among the world’s financial leaders, who met this weekend in Washington. Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warned on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that a failure by the United States to make scheduled payments to investors “would mean massive disruption the world over. And we would be at risk of tipping yet again into a recession.”
After talks broke down between President Obama and House leaders late last week, GOP senators quickly cobbled together a plan to end the government shutdown and raise the $16.7 trillion debt limit.
But Senate Democrats, emboldened by deep divisions among House Republicans and poll data showing the GOP bearing the brunt of the blame for the impasse, rejected the GOP Senate plan brokered by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), because it would allow a new round of sequester cuts to take effect in January.
On Sunday, Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) was pressing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to accept a quicker deadline on a temporary measure to fund federal agencies and reopen the government and a longer deadline for raising the debt limit,