What to Know About the History of the Debt Ceiling

Published in TIME:

But Alex Pollock, a former Treasury Department official, argued in a 2021 op-ed in The Hill that there are four precedents for U.S. defaults: 1) During the Civil War in 1862, when the U.S. printed paper money after the Union’s reserves of gold and silver coin were depleted; 2) during the Great Depression in 1933, when the government refused to repay bondholders with gold, as agreed to when the securities were sold; 3) in 1968, when the U.S. did not honor silver certificates with an exchange of silver dollars; and 4) in 1971, when the government abandoned the Bretton Woods Agreement, which included a commitment to redeem dollars held by foreign governments for gold.