What happens if the US defaults?

The homepage of the Washington Post has a clock ticking down to America’s debt-ceiling deadline: four days, 14 hours, and a fast-declining number of minutes and seconds. It also has details of the events, last night, that upset the prospect of a deal being reached yet again. The Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, had been frantically trying to corral support for a bill that would raise the ceiling in exchange for $billions of extra spending cuts. He only needed 216 of the House’s 240 Republicans to vote with him. But it wasn’t to be. The vote was called off, postponed until at least later today, as it became clear that Boehner couldn’t immediately persuade those in his party who want further cuts still. Even if a tweaked version of his bill passes today, it’s likely that the Democrat majority in the Senate will kill it off anyway.