Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"There actually is; it's a concern that we call 'crowding out.' Now, crowding out happens when the federal government goes into the credit markets and borrows money. By doing that, they're competing with private borrowers. Now, the federal government is going to pay whatever interest rate they need to to borrow that money, so if you have the federal government in there borrowing large amounts of money and the private sector trying to borrow money, what this is going to do is push up the interest rate. In essence, the federal government is going to crowd out that private borrowing. Right now, or at least in the recent past, this hasn't been viewed as a problem with the federal government borrowing lots of money simply because the private borrowing hasn't been there, because the private sector has been weak. But now as the economy is showing some signs of picking up - or is expected to pick up - we could see crowding out become an issue. In fact, we've already seen interest rates march upward in recent weeks. So this is a real concern right now about what this could do to the economic recovery."