The US has already hit the debt ceiling in Jan 2023 and the Treasury department is using accounting maneuvers to keep paying the bills with so-called "extraordinary measures" (1), which are expected to run out in the summer. At that point, if no action has been taken, the US government will be unable to pay its bills, aka default. Or, the US government could potentially choose to deploy some "gimmick" to circumvent the debt ceiling and avoid default.

Will Congress raise the debt ceiling, or will the US government be forced to either default or deploy a "gimmick" to circumvent the debt ceiling?

Resolves based on which of these happens first:

• Resolves YES if the US raises or suspends the debt ceiling

• Resolves NO if the US defaults on its debt (see /jack/will-the-us-government-default-on-i )

• Resolves NO if the US circumvents the debt ceiling, e.g. by "minting the coin", issuing forms of debt that bypass the debt limit like premium or perpetual bonds, issuing debt that violates the statutory debt ceiling, declaring the debt ceiling unconstitutional, etc. See the markets below for a non-comprehensive list of examples that would qualify.

  • The already ongoing "extraordinary measures" do not count because they are normal practice, and they only temporarily delay running out of funds due to the debt ceiling, they do not circumvent it.

(1) Extraordinary measures are things like temporarily replacing bonds in federal employee's retirement accounts with IOUs (the bonds are put back with appropriate interest after the debt ceiling crisis is over). They were explicitly legalized by Congress after the 1985 debt ceiling crisis, and they stopped being extraordinary after we used them regularly for decades of past debt ceiling crises.

Grouped markets