It took the US 200 years to reach its first $1 trillion in debt. It took 95 days to add its last.
After several weeks of build up, today the Treasury announced that total public debt surpassed $40 trillion for the first time, after jumping by over $60 billion in one day, and has now surged by $1 trillion in just over three months, and by a third of the total in less than five years, as US lawmakers continue to ignore calls to contend with historically wide fiscal deficits.
The largely expected news came just hours after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unexpectedly announced the Treasury's latest attempt to rein-in long-term borrowing costs from multi-year highs, the most important component of the growth in debt. The Treasury stunned the market when it said, just two weeks after the latest Refunding Announcement where it should have made this change, that it was ramping up the support for longer-dated securities by "increasing, by at least double, the size of liquidity support buyback operations for longer-dated nominal coupon securities (the 10-year to 20-year sector and the 20-year to 30-year sector)."
The announcement that sent yields plunging, if only for the time being.
Remarkably, it was less than 5 years ago that US debt hit $30 trillion back in January 2022, illust
