You're going to find it hard to get credit in the

future. Interest rates are going to go up or if I don't pay my if I don't pay my the loan on my home, I'll be kicked out of my

home. So we're not going to get kicked out of our home. But what is going to happen is that people only borrow, sorry, will only lend money to us if we are willing to pay a higher interest rate to offset the risk they don't get paid. Now remember, the national debt is $24 trillion. If we raise the interest rate by even half a percentage point, that's a ton of money. That money doesn't come from some abstract entity called the US government because that abstract entity is paid by yours and my taxes. So if we default for sure and for certain, someone's paying higher taxes. It's probably not you and I. It's probably more our children. But to some extent, it's us as well. That's the first immediate direct effect. That's before we then say, you know what, the global financial system is kind of built around this idea that the US government always pays its

debts. So if it is catastrophic and as a bipartisan matter, people on both sides of the aisle would view a default as catastrophe, sort of like mutually assured destruction in the nuclear context. Is that pretty good assurance that at the end of the day, there will always be a deal and there will not be a default or

not? So one view of history is Congress, both sides threaten, threaten, threaten, threaten, and then we get towards midnight on the night that it has to happen and round about 11 o'clock the grownups walk into the room and they say this has to get worked out and they work it out. And this is a view that eventually when the stakes are high enough, Congress figures it out and historically that view has been correct. Now by the same token, historically, it's also been true that the party with the majority in the house has been able to figure out who they should elect a speaker on the first round. Yes. Yes. That didn't happen this time. This Congress had a speaker running against nobody and he couldn't get elected. There was no serious Republican candidate against McCarthy and they couldn't get it done.