Shutdown: Congress Passes Bill To Stop Default

With just hours to spare before the US Treasury lost its borrowing authority, financial disaster appears to have been averted.

新闻背景：

美国时间16日晚，美国参议院首先以81票支持、18票反对投票通过了里德·麦康奈尔议案。随后该议案被送至众议院，并以285票赞成、144票反对的表决结果得到通过。根据该议案，美国联邦政府将重启至明年1月15日，财政部发行国债的权限也被延长到明年2月7日。随后奥巴马也签署了该议案，使之成为法律并开始生效。奥巴马在稍早的全国讲话中已经明确表示，“一旦法案放到我的桌上，我将立刻签署，然后政府将马上开门。”

受累于预算谈判僵局，美国联邦政府自10月1日起停摆。此后参众两院也先后提出数份旨在化解僵局的方案，但双方迟迟未能就细节问题达成妥协。在政府关门两周后，债务上限“大限日”的逼近又让外界重燃对美国债务违约的担忧，迫使两党重启谈判。

尽管如此，政府关门已经伤害美国经济和消费者信心。国际评级机构标准普尔(Standard & Poor's)表示，到目前为止，联邦政府的关门会使美国经济损失240亿美元。标普将美国2013年GDP年增长率由今年9月预计的3%下调至2%，将第四季度GDP增长率也下调了0.6%。另外标普也指出，目前美国政界的争论预示任何临时拨款议案都是权宜之计，2014年初两党料迎来下一轮博弈。

中国评级机构大公将美国评级从A下调至A-，并将美国信用评级展望维持在负面。

Finally the deal was sealed.

(…consider is laid upon the table.)

After frenzied weeks of political posturing and brinkmanship, America’s government can now reopen and crucially, it can keep paying its bills. The senate led deal will fund the government until mid-January and raised the debt ceiling until early February.

I wanna thank the leadership for coming here and getting this done, hopefully next time, it won’t be in the 11th hour, one of the things that I set throughout this process is we gotta get out of the habit of governing by crisis.

So federal workers can head back to their offices, tourists can go back to the museums, what remains is a scarred political system.

So things are moving again, at least for a while which is a huge relief for the American people who could only watch as the chaos played out on Capitol Hill, but it’s not impossible that in a couple of months’ time, America could once again find itself at a standstill.

I hope that we won’t be doing this again in January, but I wouldn’t be shocked.

I’m not happy because it’s gonna come up again. And I think this is no way to a country.

On the other side of that country the stain for politicians is similarly rife. In Barstow California there’s concern over what sort of message this sends to the world.

They’re kind of laughing at us, you know, look at us, we’re bar on money, go find another war.

It’s just runaway spending, and I think people are really getting tired of it. I do hope in the next election, they just put everybody out and start over.

Signs of relief that America won’t default on its debt were loudest on Wall Street in New York.

Oh, I think it’s fantastic, they struck a deal, I hadn’t heard about it, ok, so great, oh, what does the market do?

In the end, they all knew that it was gonna happen at some point, why the foot dragging is inexplicable to me.

Across Washington, the deal has been heralded as salvation from the brink of disaster. How it ever reached the point is perhaps the key concern.

Amada Walker, Sky News.