Weekly Round Up – October 18, 2013

Before we get to the good reads!

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A Few Good Reads

Here are a few of my favorite reads from the past week.

1. Senate stalls bi-partisan debt ceiling deal to end government shutdown:

With only five days left to a possible default, there is yet no unity in the US senate with Republicans and Democrats rejecting each other’s proposal to end the 12-day-old government shutdown.

On Saturday the focus of efforts to end the shutdown shifted to the Senate, where the two sides held negotiations in a bid to resolve the stalemate. However, the talks yielded no agreement. Open this article

2. Senate stalls bi-partisan debt ceiling deal to end government shutdown:

The Treasury department is warning that unless Congress raises the debt ceiling by October 17th the U.S. will run out of money. Simply put America won’t be able to pay its bills.

Under this worst case scenario Washington would be faced with decisions like whether to stop paying members of the armed forces, put Social Security checks on hold, or delay funding to local schools.

The U.S. might even be forced to renege on interest payments owed to our foreign debt holders. Defaulting on those obligations would shake financial markets to a degree not seen since the Great Depression. Open this article

3. Obama pressures Republicans to raise debt ceiling and end shutdown:

President Barack Obama on Saturday pressured Republican lawmakers to agree to raise the US debt ceiling for longer than they would prefer, as their fiscal impasse dragged into the weekend with five days left to find a deal.

The budget battle between Obama and Republicans who control the House of Representatives has idled hundreds of thousands of government workers hit by a 12-day government shutdown and put the US at risk of a historic debt default, possibly by next Thursday, unless the borrowing limit is raised. Open this article

4. US debt limit talks in disarray after House GOP fails to back Senate deal:

House speaker John Boehner departs a press conference following a meeting of House Republicans at the US Capitol. Photograph: Win Mcnamee/Getty Images

A fragile deal to end the US budget crisis collapsed on Tuesday when Democrats accused conservative Republicans of sabotaging the bipartisan proposals less than two days before the country’s borrowing authority expires.

A proposal by a group of Democrats and moderate Republicans in the Senate fizzled when GOP leaders in the House of Representatives failed to get their rank-and-file members to back a revised version. Open this article

5. End US debt dispute, warn IMF and World Bank:

The financial gridlock in the United States needs to be broken, experts urged at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank’s annual meeting. Words of caution also came for countries looking to up interest rates.

German Central Bank President Jens Weidmann and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble were relaxed when they spoke with the press following the annual autumn meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and its sister lending agency, the World Bank, in Washington. That’s because this time around, the burning issue for participants from 188 nations wasn’t the euro crisis, as it was last year, but rather the financial row in the US. Open this article