The House of Representatives and the Senate approved the law this week after Biden and Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy reached an agreement after tense negotiations.
The Treasury Department had warned that it would not be able to pay all of its bills by June 5 if Congress did not act by then.
Without this legislation, approved on Thursday by the Senate, with a Democratic majority, and on Wednesday by the House of Representatives, with a Republican majority, the world’s largest economy ran the risk of not being able to meet its debt commitments starting Monday.
“Nothing would have been more irresponsible or more catastrophic,” the president said in his speech on Friday.
“Finding a consensus beyond partisan differences is difficult. Unity is difficult, but we must never stop trying,” he added, repeating the message of reconciliation that marked the beginning of his term, and is now the slogan of his 2024 campaign. .
The stakes in this financial confrontation were also highly political.
This battle over public finances, which already occurred when Barack Obama was president, is unlikely to make much of an impact on the 2024 election, but it left its mark.
Ratings agency Fitch kept the US’s prized AAA rating on review, deploring “political polarization” and noting “a steady deterioration in governance over the past 15 years.”
Like almost all developed economies, the United States lives on credit and, in absolute terms, has the largest debt burden in the world.
But no other industrialized country regularly faces a rigid debt ceiling that Congress must raise.
With information from Reuters and AFP
