"The debt ceiling arguably caused a recession in the '50s: In 1959, Marshall A. Robinson wrote "The National Debt Ceiling: An Experiment in Fiscal Policy, " a Brookings Institution monograph arguing that the debt ceiling, first introduced in 1917 and then in its modern form in 1941 (and only increased once between then and the book's writing), had not only failed, but backfired.
The book is long since out of print, but according to this contemporary review in the Journal of the American Statistical Association by Fred Weston of UCLA, Robison points to an incident in 1957, when the Air Force had to stop paying its bills because of the debt ceiling. This led to a sudden $8 billion (1.7 percent of GDP) fall in defense spending, which Robinson credits with the 1957-58 recession. This in turn led to a fiscal year 1959 deficit of $12.4 billion, further suggesting that austerity measures that hurt growth don't end up cutting deficits either.
It helped create the congressional budget process: An anonymous Harvard Law Review note, "Impoundment of Funds", from 1973 details that year's debt ceiling fight. The debt ceiling was $465 billion, and the debt was set to hit that level in the summer. Nixon thus chose to have his OMB "impound," or refuse to spend, $3.4 billion in funds appropriated by Congress. He claimed that this was legally required to avoid the debt ceiling. The note argues that Nixon's reasoning was incorrect and that the US could have stayed below the debt ceiling for longer without resorting to impoundment. Nixon’s use of impoundment was one of the assertions of executive power that led to the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which established the Congressional budget process, created the Congressional Budget Office and sought to limit the president's powers in the wake of Watergate"...................READ MORE
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