Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she expects to update Congress within the next two weeks on how close the federal government is to defaulting on its financial obligations.
“I don’t want to be specific about when we do updates — when we think we have more information, but certainly within the next couple of weeks,” Yellen said Saturday in an interview with Bloomberg News.
As the White House and congressional Republicans continued to wrestle in Washington over the debt ceiling and government spending, Yellen defended the steep rise of debt issuance under the Biden administration and her optimistic outlook for the US economy.
At the same time, she sounded notes of caution, not only over the prospects of a debt default, but also related to the continued effect of rising interest rates and the deteriorating state of the commercial real estate sector.
“My sense is that the lending standards have been relatively conservative at banks,” she said of lending in commercial real estate. “But on the other hand, you’ve had a huge shock to the demand for office space from the pandemic and you have higher interest rates.”
