After Wednesday's Treasury auctions, the shortest-maturity securities, a.k.a., bills, now account for an estimated 17 percent of total debt. This is up from 15.1 percent at the beginning of the fiscal year. The latest rise in this share is in part due to the latest auction of 17-week bills, which on Wednesday sold $36.58 billion. Since there is not yet any maturing batch under this maturity, this amount went straight into the pile of federal debt.
Investors tendered $107.56 billion, a record high. The median yield 0f 4.58 percent is the second highest on record.
The yield at the 20-year auction, on the other hand, was on the low side compared to resent yields. At 3.62 percent, this batch pays less than the last four months' worth of auctioned 20-year bonds. This makes January the third month in a row with falling yield. The top, reached in October, was at 4.319 percent.
The 20-year bond auction sold $12 billion worth of debt, same as in December. At $33.96 tendered, this auction produced a T/A of 2.83, the third highest in 34 months. This indicates that if the Treasury wanted to, it could sell quite a bit more debt under long-term maturities.
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We do not give investment advice.
This blog provides analytical information solely for the purposes of 1) predicting the cost of the federal debt, and 2) for assessing the risk for a U.S. fiscal crisis. All information published here, forecasting and other, is based on publicly available data from the U.S. Treasury, including but not limited to approximately 65 percent of the current debt; on macroeconomic data, including but not limited to monetary policy decisions by the Federal Reserve; and on macroeconomic theory.
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