U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday that she doesn’t believe the federal government could still pay off all its bills before June 15 in a bid to underscore the urgency to resolve a standoff between the White House and House Republicans to raise the debt ceiling.
“Well, there’s always uncertainty about tax receipts and spending,” Yellen told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “And so it’s hard to be absolutely certain about this, but my assessment is that the odds of reaching June 15 while being able to pay all of our bills is quite low.”
Yellen, in elaborating, said there would be hard choices to make about payments to Americans if there was a failure to raise the $31.4 trillion debt ceiling before the Treasury ran out of cash and was forced to default. Less than two weeks remain until June 1, when the Treasury Department has warned that the federal government could be unable to pay all its debts, which would trigger a default that could cause chaos in financial markets and spike interest rates….