Hello! Welcome to the You Could Never Have Too Many Bananas episode of Slate Money.

Your guys are the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Hammond of Axios. I have

a British accent. We will talk about that in Slate Plus. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios

who does not have a British accent. Hello, and I say bananas. Can you say bananas and where's

your accent from Emily? Let's just say New York. We'll just say New York. And Elizabeth Spires, if

you listen to Slate Plus, you will hear her desperately trying to do an English accent. It's kind

of glorious. You claim that your accent is mostly Southern still? No, I think it's mostly

nowhere person now, but it's got a little southern inflection. So Elizabeth is going to explain

to us all of the politics behind the debt ceiling and why it's so stupid and why it exists

and why it hasn't been abolished. We are going to talk about regulation of tech in general

and of AI in particular, and whether it's a good idea and why at least one AI CEO seems

to want it. We are going to talk about greed flation. The idea that inflation is caused

by companies raising their profit margins and their prices and just trying to make more

money for their shareholders. It's all coming up on Slate money. Okay, everyone, it's

the debt ceiling. It's come back. Those of us with long memories who've been financial

journalists for a while. Remember various other debt ceiling fiasco's 2011 was a big

one. This one seems bigger than most. There is this unbelievably stupid thing called the

debt ceiling and we have hit it. We have hit it for a few months now, but now all of the

emergency measures that Treasury puts in place when we hit the debt ceiling have run out

or about to run out. Janet Yellen says we could hit the X state as soon as June 1st,

which is very soon and all manner of politicians and economists are busy parading out a classic

parade of horribles of what happens if we hit the X state without raising the debt ceiling.

...