With just one month left until the Treasury "X-date", or the moment when it would run out of cash without a debt-ceiling resolution...

... the time has come for dire, apocalyptic threats to spook Congress into action and specifically reaching a compromise on a debt ceiling resolution, and S&P - which infamously downgraded the US in 2011 during the last debt ceiling fiasco - is happy to be the source of bad news.

In a report published on Wednesday titled "With A Shutdown, There Will Be Blood", U.S. chief economist at S&P, Beth Ann Bovino, writes that "failure to raise the debt limit would likely be more catastrophic to
the economy than the 2008 failure of Lehman Brothers and would erase
many of the gains of the subsequent recovery."