The Great Debate UK
from The Great Debate:
At least U.S. has Japan to fall back on
(James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)
The bad news for holders of U.S. debt, in case you missed it, is that China has sold so many Treasuries that it is no longer America's leading lender.
The worse news is that there is a new creditor-in-chief, and it is Japan, an aging country with its own government debt bubble to contend with.
China sold about $34 billion of Treasuries in December, taking its holdings to $755 billion, while Japan increased its purchases and now is in the top spot of the Treasury Department's scroll of merit, with $768 billion. China's holdings peaked in April, since when the trend has been gently downward.
From a demographic point of view, though, the United States making a long term borrowing plan based on access to Japanese funding is a bit like my daughter making a retirement plan that has me continuing to work when she stops at its centre.
Brooks Newmark drops a debt bombshell
Britain’s national debt is far higher than Prime Minister Gordon Brown is willing to acknowledge, Conservative MP Brooks Newmark argues in a new paper published by the Centre for Policy Studies.
The true level of government debt is not 805 billion pounds as currently reported by the Office for National Statistics, Newmark says, calling for an independent audit of the government’s books.
from The Great Debate:
Bond markets give stress test thumbs down
-- James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own --
The most revealing verdict on the results of the U.S. banking stress test was delivered not by shareholders but by the vigilantes of the bond market, who shunned an auction of 30-year government debt.
This makes sense: if the U.S. is letting banks off too lightly it will be taxpayers and the people who lend the U.S. money who will have to pick up the bill.
from The Great Debate:
U.S. government borrowing runs into resistance
-- John Kemp is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own --
Investors have started to balk at absorbing large quantities of U.S. government debt, taking on substantial inflation and devaluation risk in return for little reward. While the government has no trouble placing short-term debt with a maturity of up to 2 years, longer-dated securities are proving much harder to sell.
Increasing resistance from the market explains why the Federal Reserve felt it had no choice but to announce it would start buying back longer-term U.S. Treasury securities last week, in a $300 billion program of direct quantitative easing and monetization.
