Treasury Secretary Lew Gives Strange Warning About a Terrible Accident

[link to z3news.com]

In an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday October 19, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew warned the U.S. Treasury will run out of money by Tuesday November 3, less than two weeks from now, unless the debt ceiling is raised.

That’s a story we have all heard before as the debt ceiling has already been raised 74 times since 1962 (Source: Wikipedia). But Secretary Lew added a strange warning about a terrible accident:

“Only Congress can act to raise the debt limit. I will have used all the tools that I have as of November 3rd, and then we’re operating on cash.”

“I worry every time we hit this that sometime there could be an accident, and that would be terrible. Any time you wait until the last possible minute you are inviting a risk, and this is not a last minute that we can know with absolute certainty. I just wrote a letter last week to Congress telling them that the date is November 3, but a few weeks ago we thought the date was November 5.”

“According to our best estimates November 3 is when we will exhaust what we call extraordinary measures, those are the things that we can do to manage things. I will run out of things I can manage on November 3. We will then have $30 billion of cash or less, and on any given day we can need as much as $60 billion, so the risk is real.” (S0urce: CNBC)