美国政府债务问题

William Blair the actual yield on the debt itself. A breakdown of U.S.Treasurys shareholders (exhibit 1) shows that 39.5% areheld by the Federal Reserve, 5.5% by banks, 1.3% by insur-ance companies, and 23.3% by the rest of the world (themajority of which includes foreign central banks as reserveassets). Thus, more than 50% of Treasurys are held byentities for reasons other than yield, i.e., currency manage-ment, liability matching, or regulatory purposes. Chair Powell:[W]e don’t see ourselves as, youknow, the judges of appropriate fiscal policy. I willsay, and many of my predecessors have said, thatwe’re on an unsustainable fiscal path and thatneeds to be addressed over time. But I think tryingto get into that with lawmakers would be—wouldbe kind of inappropriate, given our independenceand our need to stick to our knitting. Edward Lawrence:Is there any conversation thenabout the Federal Reserve financing some of thatdebt that we’re seeing coming down the pike? Chair Powell:No. Under no circumstances. –FOMC Meeting June 2023 The downgrading of U.S. government debt from AAA toAA+ by the rating agency Fitch has once again put U.S.government debt back into the spotlight. It was precededseveral days earlier by the Treasury’s announcementthat it would be issuing even more debt going forwardthan the markets had anticipated. Yields on 10-year U.S.Treasury notes increased from 3.96% on the day of theannouncement to 4.18% in the following few days. Themove has started to spook investors, who are still recov-ering from last year’s collapse in bond prices—one ofthe largest drawdowns in the market’s history—as wellas yet another seat-of-the-pants debt ceiling standoff.Inspeaking with clients, government debt dynamics areonce again top of mind, and therefore the topic of thisEconomics Weekly. It is also worth remembering that as long as countries suchas China want to maintain their current growth strategies,which crucially includes maintaining a 2% current accountsurplus, they have little choice but to invest in safe dollarassets such as U.S. Treasurys. There is no other market inthe world that is large enough and open enough to be ableto absorb the size of capital flows that China needs to sendabroad in order to maintain this structure. China does notyet have the social structures in place to enable the privatesector to save less; in fact, the severity of COVID lockdownsseems to have only heightened households’ desire to saveand has not resulted in the kind of post-pandemic spend-ing surge seen across Western countries. Similarly, as theeconomist Michael Pettis has noted, the United Stateswould also have to actively restrict and limit access to itsmarkets by foreign investors and increase its savings rate. Is Downgrading U.S. Debt Meaningful? The answer, unfortunately, like just about every question ineconomic is, it depends. The reality is that the United States will neverunintention-ally default on its debt, and there is no known tipping pointbeyond which U.S. debt-to-GDP becomes a major problem.The United States also has a floating currency, has controlof its own monetary policy, and importantly issues all of itsdebt in its own currency. It is also still the world’s reservecurrency of choice, and this is something that is unlikelyto change for many years to come. From this perspective,judging U.S. debt against other AAA countries, such asGermany or the Netherlands, which do not have control oftheir own monetary policy nor their own free-floating cur-rency, is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Lastly, as we have written previously, one also needs tolook at the math of the debt-to-GDP ratio, which is basedon the simple formula: Where D = debt, Y = output, r = interest rate, g = nominalGDP growth, d = primary deficit, and t = time. Essentially, this formula is telling us that debt-to-GDPgrowth in the current year is simply a function of thedebt-to-GDP ratio last year, plus interest paid on that debtless revenue growth (i.e., nominal GDP), plus whatever theprimary budget deficit is (i.e., increase in spending minusrevenues outside of any interest costs on the debt). Another important point to note is that very few holdersof U.S. Treasurys are sensitive to the ratings that may beassigned to them by private sector rating agencies—i.e., itis doubtful that many investors felt the need to dump theirTreasury holdings following the downgrade. Furthermore, because the dollar is the world’s reservecurrency, many holders are also relatively insensitive to William Blair French economist Olivier Blanchard hasargued that,basedon this formula, for the debt to be sustainable, the rate ofnet interest paid, or “r,” has to be lower than the growthrate of the economy, or “g.” If that is not the case, the coun-try would need to scale back its primary deficit, or “d,” (i.e.,its spending excluding interest costs). With r less than g,the debt can increase with little fiscal cost and taxes do nothave to be raised. There is,