National Debt Default Could Raise Your Mortgage Payment

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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National Debt Default Could Raise Your Mortgage Payment

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If the federal government defaults on its debt, the recession could put millions of Americans out of work. However, the first wave of trouble will be what people pay for home mortgages, particularly for those with floating rates. People with fixed rates will be lucky. (The national debt under every president for the past 100  years.)
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The federal government has hit its borrowing limit of $31.7 trillion. Federal officials are juggling several sets of expenditures to extend the day this will affect the ability of the government to pay its bills at all. The expected end date of these efforts will be in early June.
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The debt issued by the U.S. government is considered the safest in the world. The United States has never defaulted, and every time the debt ceiling has been reached, Congress has raised it. At this point, the Republicans who control the House of Representatives want sharp cuts in federal spending to raise the limit. The Biden administration says it will not accept this solution.

The more risk loans take on, the higher the interest rate. The higher interest payments are meant to offset the chance of a loan being paid. Most interest rates in the United States are tied to the rate the government pays to raise money.
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Many Americans locked in interest rates at or about 3% when the Federal Reserve kept rates at historic lows. Those rates have risen recently but have not skyrocketed. Even with the moderate rise in interest rates, some Americans have variable mortgage rates reaching 7%.
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A default would raise the sum the federal government pays in interest rates to 6% or 7% within days. Federal government debt suddenly will become risky. That means variable rate mortgages could spike to 10% almost overnight. People would be faced with cutting costs simply to make home payments. In turn, the housing market could buckle under foreclosures driven by the higher mortgage payments.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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