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Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, has warned that the US is ‘days away from a very dangerous moment’ because of the federal government’s borrowing crisis.
Kim has urged US policymakers to come to an agreement regarding the government’s debt ceiling before the deadline on Thursday. If the US fails to reach an agreement it will run short of funds, which could lead to a default on its debts – a situation Mr Kim warned would be a ‘disastrous event for the world’.
The US government has been in partial shutdown since the 1st October, with politicians being unable to agree funding for current spending. The shutdown has cost more than $3.5 billion to date, and has resulted in hundreds of thousands of federal employees being sent home and government offices closing.
As a result of the shutdown, more than $2 billion dollars is outstanding in unpaid salary and nearly 900,000 government employees have been furloughed. The following visualisation from Dan Delany at Enigma takes a simple look at these employees, with an interactive tree map that shows furloughed proportions by department (click the image to see the full interactive version):
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