For people like the Corbetts, convinced that their brownstone on St. James Place can only rise in value as their neighborhood improves, there is still room to borrow more and spend it avidly, softening any downturn.
With little room to borrow, consumers are retrenching, and they're slashing their discretionary purchases, as I explained in my Sept. 29 column ("Worse Is Yet to Come").
The Treasury Department has said that it will run out of room to borrow more money that day and may be unable to pay some of its bills unless Congress agrees to lift the debt ceiling.
Still, there is a case to be made for paying down some debt in good times, to leave more room to borrow when the baby boom generation retires and pension payments soar.
When the Great Recession hit, the government had room to borrow to finance our fiscal lifesavers, including the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and TARP, which helped keep the deep recession from turning into a global depression.
The government will begin Monday with about $30 billion cash in the bank and a little more room to borrow as a result of extraordinary measures launched in the wake of the debt-ceiling crisis.
In addition, none of the sports teams have much debt (though there is still over $150 million of debt on the Staples Center, where the Lakers and Kings play), so a buyer would have more room to borrow money against those assets before running afoul of the NBA's and NHL's debt limitiations.
ELT, Thornbury argued, had become similarly dependent on a constant fix of materials and technology, at the expense of the learning possibilities that could be harvested simply from what goes on "within and between" the people in the room (to borrow Stevick's phrase).
Heavy household debt, meanwhile, has left consumers with little room to borrow more.
"Eventually they'll run out of room to borrow," he said.
