Lori Montgomery

Congress goes on vacation Friday, before then a budget deal needs to be reached in order to preserve several social safety programs. Lori Montgomery, politics and economic policy reporter for the Washington Post, explains why this deal is not a landmark of bipartisanship despite moving along (relatively) smoothly.

[S&P doesn't] have a lot of credibility left after totally blowing all major calls of the past decade...The chance that the United States would not pay its debts after more than 200...

Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, talks about why Standard & Poor's downgraded the outlook for U.S. debt to "negative" and how that factors into the ongoing battle over the national debt. Washington Post Economic Policy Reporter reporter Lori Montgomery joins the conversation to talk about how the S&P rating might change the political landscape of debt in Washington.

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