Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, former financial exec, meet budget director Mick Mulvaney, former Freedom Caucus crusader. This is where Wall Street hits a wall of ignorance.
Mulvaney along with Trump's chief economic adviser Gary Cohn have signaled their willingness to see riders added to a bill to raise the debt ceiling. Bloomberg writes:
"At the end of the day, Congress is going to raise the debt ceiling because they have no other choice,” Cohn said in a [Friday] interview on CNBC, brushing aside objections by conservative lawmakers who question the need to increase the limit.
“Treasury secretary would love to do a clean debt ceiling -- I get that. But if we need to get things attached to get it through, we’ll attach things,” Cohn continued.
That right there is a wink to the House crazies that they can go ahead and demand things like spending cuts as a condition of raising the debt ceiling. Except that Republicans will almost surely need Democratic votes to pass that bill.
For their part, Democrats are more likely to insist on their own concessions, such as an assurance that the administration will continue making Obamacare subsidy payments to insurance companies.
Though Treasury secretaries have traditionally represented official administration policy on debt, not in Trumpworld. Mulvaney's made sure to publicly poke Mnuchin in the eye.
Mulvaney, who is also a member of the Trump Cabinet, contested Mnuchin in an interview with the Washington Examiner published Wednesday, saying he would “like to see things attached to it that drive certain spending reforms and debt reforms in the future.” He said Mnuchin didn’t necessarily represent the administration’s position.
Mulvaney also pledged last week that “there’s absolutely no way that the U.S. will ever default on its debt. Guess he doesn’t recall 2011, when default was barely averted and S&P Global Ratings downgraded the U.S. government’s rating from AAA to AA+, or 2013, when when the debt ceiling crisis dragged out over the course of about a year.
If anyone could induce a catastrophic default, it’s Mulvaney and the House Freedom Caucus.