Fed Is Buying 61 Percent of U.S. Government Debt

BOB ADELMANN
New American
March 30, 2012

In his attempt to explode the myth that there is unlimited demand for U.S. government debt, former Treasury official Lawrence Goodman explained that there is high perceived demand because the Federal Reserve is doing most of the buying.

Wrote Goodman,

Last year the Fed purchased a stunning 61% of the total net Treasury issuance, up from negligible amounts prior to the 2008 financial crisis.

This not only creates the false impression of limitless demand for U.S. debt but also blunts any sense of urgency to reduce supersized budget deficits.

What about Japan and China? Aren’t they the major purchasers of U.S. debt? Not any more, notes Goodman. Foreign purchases of U.S. debt dropped to less than 2 percent  of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) from almost 6 percent just three years ago. And private sector investors — banks, money market and bond mutual funds, individuals and corporations — have cut their buying way back as well, to less than 1 percent of GDP, down from 6 percent. This serves to hide the fact that the government can’t find outside buyers willing to accept rates of return that are below the inflation rate (“negative interest”) given the precarious financial condition of the government. It also hides the impact of $1.3 trillion deficits from the public who would likely get much more concerned if real, true market rates of interest were being demanded for purchasing U.S. debt, as such higher rates would increase the deficit even further. Finally it takes pressure off Congress to “do something” because there is no public clamor over the matter, at least for the moment.

One of those promoting the myth that buyers of U.S. debt must exist because interest rates are so low is none other than one of those recently seated at the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee table,Alan Blinder. Now a professor of economics at Princeton University, Blinder was vice chairman of the Fed in the mid-nineties and should know all about the Fed’s manipulations and machinations in the money markets. Apparently not.

On January 19 Blinder wrote in the Wall Street Journal that

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Strange as it may seem with trillion-dollar-plus deficits, the U.S. government doesn’t have a short-run borrowing problem at all. On the contrary, investors all over the world are clamoring to lend us money at negative real interest rates.

In purchasing power terms, they are paying the U.S. government to borrow their money!

Blinder repeated the error in front of the Senate Banking Committee just one week later: “In fact, world financial markets are eager to lend the United States government vast amounts at negative real interest rates. That means that, in purchasing power terms, they are paying us to borrow their money!”

Full article here

This article was posted: Friday, March 30, 2012 at 2:31 am

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