Congress maxxed out its credit card, just like the rest of us 💳

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Dave here, in for Allison, who is off to the woods to spend some quality time with Hank, who is a very good boy. Let's do this.

By Dave Goldman

💳 JUST RAISE THE DEBT CEILING

To the delight of precisely no one, the debt ceiling crisis is back.

For the uninitiated, here's a quick and dirty explainer about this nonsense: Congress has allocated a bunch of money for stuff over the years, and paid for all those projects by selling Treasury bonds. Its bills are coming due, and Congress needs to make good on its payments by selling more Treasuries. But Congress will have to separately approve the payments on its debt by raising the debt ceiling – the amount of money the United States can borrow.

Essentially, Congress maxxed out its credit card, and now it needs to decide whether to pay it off.

If it doesn't, that could spell doom for the country's credit rating, potentially increasing the cost of borrowing and signaling to America's creditors that it can't be trusted to pay back its debts. That's not a good idea anytime – but especially when the country is recovering from its worst crisis since the Great Depression. Yet Congress is playing chicken with the economy at its most fragile time.

Why it matters: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen didn't mince words when she testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee Wednesday.

"I believe it would precipitate a financial crisis," she said about failing to raise the debt ceiling. "It would threaten the jobs and savings of Americans at a time when we're still recovering from the Covid pandemic."

She urged lawmakers to raise the debt ceiling now, because "duh." But more specifically because the pandemic made Treasury's job of determining when America will run out of funds to pay bondholders significantly harder. It could happen as early as August, she said, potentially triggering a credit crisis when Congress is on break.

The last time America came close to the edge, in a 2011 standoff, the United States' credit rating got downgraded and the stock market tanked.

There's some good news … we hope. CNN's Manu Raju, Ryan Nobles and Lauren Fox reported Thursday that Senate Democrats could delay their August recess to do an adorably named "vote-a-rama" – an avalanche of votes that presumably would include a debt ceiling increase.

My take: Yellen is doing her job by sounding the alarm bell. Whether or not America runs out of money to pay its bills in August or later isn't really the point. The problem is with the asinine system in which Congress can spend up the wazoo and then take America to the edge of crisis to score political points. But what else is new?

🦆 WHAT'S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE

Canada Goose is ditching fur because it's 2021.

The company had mostly used wild coyote fur (no pet coyotes were ever hurt) in linings for its zillion-dollar winter coats. But, as part of a plan to become more sustainable, Canada Goose said Thursday it will stop buying fur by the end of this year and cease manufacturing fur products no later than the end of 2022, my colleague Jordan Valinsky reports.

Critics, including PETA, have been calling on the company for several years to stop using fur. Canada Goose warned in its 2017 IPO filing that its reputation and sales could be hurt by protestors or animal welfare activists, who oppose the use of fur.

Just don't come crying to Canada Goose when a coyote comes into your backyard.

🗣️ QUOTE OF THE DAY

You have a giant, but several other gorillas in the room, too.

— Nicholas Hyett, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, discussing the social media market.

He told my colleague Julia Horowitz that antitrust regulators could go after Google harder than Facebook, because Google is pretty much the only game in town. Facebook is massive, but at least it competes with Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok and a bunch of other big players.