The ax came very close, but US President Joe Biden will be able to congratulate himself on having found an "agreement in principle". A few days before the deadline, the head of state managed to find a compromise with Republican leader Kevin McCarthy in order to avoid a default on payment by the United States. The agreement, however, will still need to be validated by Congress.
The House of Representatives, with a Republican majority, will vote on Wednesday, its boss said. Next will come the Senate, with a Democratic majority. Kevin McCarthy said in a short speech that the budget compromise found, which he did not provide details, was "completely worthy of the American people". The conservative leader only welcomed the "historic cuts" in public spending that he said the agreement provides, which was the main demand of the Republicans.
"This agreement is a compromise, which means that everyone does not get everything they want," reacted for his part Joe Biden, assuring that the text "reduces spending while protecting essential public programs". The Democratic president called the deal with the Tories "good news, because it avoids what would have been a catastrophic (payment) default."
Kevin McCarthy has indicated that he will meet again on Sunday with Joe Biden and will publish the text the same day, the result of difficult negotiations. According to several American media, the agreement reached between the executive and the opposition raises for two years, so until after the presidential election of 2024, the public debt ceiling of the United States. Without raising this limit, the first world power risked being in default of payment on June 5, unable to honor its financial commitments: salaries, pensions or reimbursements to its creditors.
Like almost all major economies, the United States lives on credit. But unlike other developed countries, America regularly comes up against a legal constraint: the debt ceiling, the maximum amount of indebtedness of the United States, which must be formally raised by Congress.
From this routine legislative procedure, the Republicans, in the majority in the House of Representatives since January, have made an instrument of political pressure. Refusing to issue a so-called "blank check" to the Democratic president, they conditioned any increase in this cap, currently set at $31.4 trillion, on budget cuts. Re-election candidate Joe Biden has long refused to come to the negotiating table, accusing the opposition of holding the US economy "hostage" by demanding such cuts.
After several meetings at the White House between the two men, the teams of the president and the Republican "speaker" finally got down to endless negotiating sessions - all of which were extensively commented on by All-Washington. The agreement in principle found on Saturday evening gives a little air to the financial markets, which have never really panicked but that this paralysis was starting to get impatient. It is in fact very common for last-minute compromises to be reached on this type of file.
The rating agency Fitch had placed the AAA rating of the United States "under review" on Thursday, saying that failure to reach an agreement "would be a negative sign in terms of governance". The world economy, already in the grip of "high uncertainty", could have "done without" these tense negotiations, had also criticized the director of the International Monetary Fund Kristalina Georgieva. Still, this compromise must now be validated by the Senate, narrowly controlled by the Democrats, and by the House of Representatives, on which the Conservatives have a fragile majority.
Some progressives within the Democratic Party, as well as elected representatives from the Republican Party, have threatened not to ratify, or to delay as much as possible a text that would make too many concessions to the opposing camp. A Republican elected to the House of Representatives, Bob Good, estimated on Saturday that in view of what he knew of the compromise, "no elected representative claiming to be from the conservative camp could justify a positive vote".
