In the wake of U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s offer to Congressional Republicans to avoid the upcoming fiscal cliff, GOP leaders have been formulating an official response in the form of a new deal.
This Sunday, the secretary made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows, including CNN’s State of the Nation, where he reiterated that Republicans would have to cut a deal that featured some tax hikes.
Comments from the William Dudley, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s current president, imply that the central bankers might press ahead regardless of the warnings.
In a sign that there could be a few more hurdles to jump in the resolution negotiations for the upcoming fiscal cliff, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) told reporters during a recent press conference that he has low hopes for a positive outcome in the talks.
Once considered a sacred cow among the GOP, several conservative lawmakers, in recent days, have begun to renounce “The Pledge” as archaic and inappropriate for the current economic crisis.
With just over a month before the fiscal cliff is set to potentially deal a fatal blow to the U.S. economic recovery, another major problem is looming on the fiscal horizon: the debt ceiling.
Calling the fiscal cliff a “substantial threat,” Bernanke conceded that the central bank’s toolkit of monetary policies was beginning to lose its effectiveness after several years of on-and-off quantitative easing.