Disregard the headline below ... Geithner knows damn well Treasury debt will be downgraded:
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Tim Geithner uncertain about downgrade
Though the Senate is poised on Tuesday to give final passage to the bill to raise the debt ceiling, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner can’t say for sure that the U.S. government will keep its AAA credit rating.
“I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. I think this is a good result but a terrible process,” he told ABC News on Monday night when asked if there might be a credit downgrade despite the deal. “And again, again, as the world watched Congress step up to the edge of the abyss it made them really wonder whether this place can work.”
In remarks that aired Tuesday morning on “Good Morning America,” Geithner said that Americans’ “confidence … was absolutely very damaged by this spectacle they’ve seen in Washington of a significant number of elected officials in this country threatening default.”
[ You mean like the President, Timmy? ]
But he doesn’t think that Americans’ wavering confidence will lead to a double-dip recession. “I don’t think that that risk right now is very significant,” he said. “The economy is absolutely slower than we thought, and that’s happening around the world.”
In his first public comments since the deal was reached, Geithner described it as “a good agreement” that “will be good for the economy long-term.”
“It avoids doing more damage in the short term because the president refused to accept the types of deep spending cuts that many in Congress wanted,” he added.
Asked if the spending cuts in the deal will lead to job losses or hurt job creation efforts – as some critics have charged – Geithner said it wouldn’t. “No, it will not,” he said.
Nor will it create jobs, he added. “No, this agreement itself, on its own, doesn’t create jobs,” he said. “What it does is it avoids doing more damage in the short term, because the president refused to accept the types of deep spending cuts that many in congress wanted, and it, by locking in some long term savings it raises, it improves the odds over time.”
It’s been reported that Geithner would leave the Treasury Department soon after the debt ceiling was raised, but he said he hasn’t made plans for his departure.
“I haven’t made that decision yet,” he said. “And you know, we’ve got a lot of challenges, president’s got a lot of challenges, and, you know, I got other pressures on me, too. But I’ll make that decision at the right moment.”
Read more: politico.com |
