1) If the US defaults, it will be an excuse for Wall Street to raise the cost of borrowing for decades increasing 1% profits over the long run.
2) One capitalist always kills many, especially in crashes, panics and depressions, when they can buy up a lot of failing capital cheap. So, the tea Republicans have long been blocking government actions to help "the" economy; and that's because,not only were they trying to make Obama look bad, but the "one" capitalists, the corporations with the greatest concentrations of money want another recession so they can clean up on weak capitals, cutthroat competition. Another slang expression of this is "when the going gets tough, the tough get going", going to cannibalize other capitals.
3) The capitalist ideological leaders and economists have long accepted that recessions, panics,crashes are cyclically inevitable in capitalism. So, they have decided they can survive and exploit them best if they start them, with planning in advance. They have also won a too-big-to-fail bailout doctrine as US policy.There is a long history of government bailout of corporations ( (History of U.S. Gov't Bailouts
http://www.propublica.org/special/government-bailouts
:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_big_to_fail)
The decades of universal cyclical crises have drummed negative dialectics into the heads of the practical bourgeoisie.
"The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, and whose crowning point is the universal crisis. That crisis is once again approaching, although as yet but in its preliminary stage; and by the universality of its theatre and the intensity of its action it will drum dialectics even into the heads of the mushroom-upstarts of the new, holy Prusso-German empire."
Karl Marx London January 24, 1873