Global fears grow as US deadlock deepens

Amid warnings of dangers to the world at large:

The political and financial crisis gripping the US appeared to have deepened after President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner accused one another of failing to negotiate in good faith to avert an unprecedented default early next week.

The impact of a failure to raise the US borrowing limit could extend beyond its borders and damage the global economy, the chief of the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday.

In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Christine Lagarde urged US political leaders to show the same “political courage” that European leaders demonstrated last week, when they agreed on several new measures to address that continent’s debt crisis.

But in the US on Tuesday, positions seemed only to harden after Obama and Boehner engaged in an extraordinary joust over fiscal issues that have consumed Washington since a large block of first-term members of the US House of Representatives, elected last year under the mantle of the small-government, low-tax Tea Party, returned the lower chamber to Republican control. Al Jazeera