Hello from Louisville, KY at the Advisor Group’s NXT Conference. Jeremiah Thompson and I have been here at this amazing three-day conference focusing on the future of the financial planning and wealth management industry.
We just came out of the final closing session with Chief Economist, Phil Blancato, of Ladenburg Thalmann Asset Management where he talked about the current economic environment and the economic outlook in the near future. One thing we want to highlight from that presentation that we have been getting a lot of questions on is the current debt ceiling debate going on in Congress.
The US is very close to reaching the limit of how much they are allowed to borrow to meet their expenses. If they do end up hitting the limit and can no longer borrow more money, many wonder what they will do. If they do end up reaching that limit before Congress passes a bill to increase the limit, it means that the US Treasury will have to figure out which bills and payments to prioritize and which won’t get paid. This understandably causes a lot of anxiety and uncertainty over what would happen.
I’d like to share some perspective recently shared by Phil Blancato, with which we agree. First, the raising of the debt ceiling has happened 78 times throughout history. 78 times we got close to running out of money and 78 times they successfully raised the limit to be able to meet our obligations. So this is now the 79th time. It’s been the same story over and over for 78 times. It’s like watching a movie that you’ve seen 78 times. If you watch it for a 79th time, you would expect the same ending.
And the majority of the time, when the country gets close to reaching the debt limit, Congress does not pass an increase to it right away. That is very rare. It almost always sparks a debate that doesn’t get resolved until the last minute within weeks or even days of the deadline. In addition, the stock market has historically been very volatile when these debt debates have taken place in the past but has also recovered quickly once the issue was resolved.
Of course, we can’t guarantee that what happened in the past will happen again but we do feel confident that the legislative and executive branches will get this worked out to increase the limit.
Even if this doesn’t happen by June 8th, the Treasury Department does have other tools and resources they can use to make the funds stretch a little further until it is resolved.
So we do not recommend that you take any action in your accounts as a reaction to the debt ceiling situation. Instead, we recommend that you leave your investments as they are designed to meet your long-term goals.
We hope you found this information helpful. Jeremiah and I have really benefited a lot from this conference and are excited to see how we can apply the knowledge we have gained into our work at Kramer Wealth Managers and to benefit our clients going forward.
