This paper explores a natural connection between fiscal multipliers and foreign holdings of public debt. Although fiscal expansions can raise domestic economic activity through various channels, they can also have crowding-out effects if the resources used to acquire public debt reduce domestic...

This article explores the challenges posed by the rising US national debt and government budget deficits. Using a combination of literature review and statistical analysis, the article examines the factors contributing to the national debt and the potential consequences of unsustainable...

This paper empirically investigates the impact of changes in US real interest rates on sovereign default risk in emerging economies using the method of identification through heteroskedasticity. Policy-induced increases in US interest rates starkly raise default risk in emerging market...

We study the nature of systemic sovereign credit risk using CDS spreads for the U.S. Treasury, individual U.S. states, and major European countries. Using a multifactor affine framework that allows for both systemic and sovereign-specific credit shocks, we find that there is considerable...

The U.S. dollar exchange rate clears the global market for dollar-denominated safe assets. We find that shifts in the demand and supply of safe dollar assets are important drivers of variation in the dollar exchange rate, bond yields, and other global financial variables. An increase in the...

In the second half of 1953 the United States, for the first time, risked exceeding the statutory limit on Treasury debt. This paper describes how Congress, the White House, and Treasury officials dealt with the looming crisis - by deferring and reducing expenditures, monetizing "free" gold that...

In 2001, the U.S. gross public debt was about $6 trillion; a decade later it was $14 trillion; by the end of 2012 it exceeded $16 trillion. A large part of that increase was absorbed by foreign holders, especially central banks in China and Japan. With the U.S. government gross debt ratio now in...

The United States faces two economic challenges: slow growth and an ever-increasing ratio of debt to GDP. Many policymakers believe they face a dilemma because the policy solutions to the two problems are opposite. To address the slow recovery, standard — Keynesian — economics suggests...

This chapter adopts the working assumption that it is conceivable that at some time in the future it would be in the interest of the United States to restructure its sovereign debt (i.e., to reduce the principal amount). It addresses in particular U.S. Treasury Securities. The chapter first...

We develop a debt-to-GDP forecasting framework incorporating the classical debt accounting relationship relating the debt-to-GDP ratio to its previous period value, the growth rate of the economy, the government cost of debt service, and the primary balance. We present a linearization of the...