Bill Clinton walks back debt-limit comments

{mosads}That suggestion seemed to run counter to the hard line Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has taken on the debt limit for months — he maintained at a separate event Wednesday Congress had no choice but to raise the limit. It also may have given credence to arguments by some GOP members that the debt limit does not need to be raised immediately.

However, a Clinton spokesman said later in the day that the former president “inadvertently misspoke” on the matter.

“What he meant to say was that if a vote to extend the debt limit failed in advance of a default, that might not be harmful for a couple of days, but that if people thought that we might actually default, that in his words ‘we were literally not going to pay our bills anymore,’ then they would stop [people from] buying our debt,” Clinton spokesman Matt McKenna said, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Clinton “did not in any way mean to suggest that a default would not be highly damaging for the economy even for a very short period of time,” he added.

The government bumped up against the debt limit earlier this month, but the Treasury Department has taken action to avoid a default, which Geithner says can be averted until Aug. 2.