Research
US debt is mathematically unsustainable by nearly every serious projection—interest costs alone hit $970 billion in 2025 and are headed toward $2.1 trillion by 2036, while the One Big Beautiful Bill adds $4.7 trillion to the ten-year deficit—yet the United States has not faced a market crisis because reserve currency status allows it to borrow in its own currency at suppressed rates, a privilege that delays but does not cancel the arithmetic. The central tension is whether that privilege is structural or contingent: Western institutions like the CBO treat it as a buffer that buys time for policy adjustment, while non-Western analysts—particularly from China, India, and the Gulf—document active, accelerating efforts to build alternatives, arguing that the privilege persists only as long as foreign governments voluntarily choose to sustain it. Defense spending is largely a sideshow to this question, since the actual fiscal drivers are mandatory entitlement spending and compounding interest costs; the real stakes are whether a loss of reserve currency credibility—through sanctions overuse, Fed independence erosion, or sustained fiscal dominance—triggers the kind of sudden confidence break that transforms a manageable trajectory into a crisis before political institutions can respond.
WASHINGTON, DC –Today, the Joint Economic Committee released its Monthly Debt Update for December, including the national debt's interest ...
How much funding is available to this agency? $2.08 Trillion in budgetary resources. 12.9% of the FY 2026 U.S. federal budget ... 2025 ...
Without the gold constraint, U.S. monetary and fiscal policy became more flexible – and the U.S. began running trade deficits more consistently.
MMT proponents further argue that government spending must precede the circulation of currency. According to their view, public expenditure ...
US debt already stood at 120 percent of GDP in 2024. US ... For the stochastic debt sustainability analysis (SDSA), we used the ...
The federal government reported a surplus of $215 billion in April FY26, down $43 billion from the $258 billion surplus recorded in April FY25. The federal ...
This paper argues that government debt has a bond-type payoff due to a constraint on the size of government surpluses and the cost to consumers of researching ...
It turns out that there is no longer any compelling empirical reason to think that the 90 percent threshold is operable any more either.
Government Debt to GDP in the United States is expected to reach 125.80 percent of GDP by the end of 2026, according to Trading Economics global macro models ...
In CBO's projections, the federal budget deficit in fiscal year 2026 is $1.9 trillion, and federal debt rises to 120 percent of GDP in 2036.
In 2025, the United States paid $970 billion in interest costs. Relative to the size of the economy, interest costs would reach 3.2 percent of gross ...
Recognition of the need for greater government intervention in the economy is increasingly shaping the US political debate, with this shift ...
Government spending continues unchecked under the MMT logic until inflation surges sharply, either in consumer prices, asset markets or both.
July 01, 2025. Top dollar no more? Learn more about the factors threatening the dominance of the world's reserve currency. What is de-dollarization?
Compared to many advanced economies, financial markets in. EMDEs tend to be less developed, and their domestic debt markets are more exposed to market stress ...
2024. 3.4. Uruguay. 2024. 2.3. Uzbekistan. 2018. 2.9. Vanuatu · Venezuela, RB. 2023. 0.5. Viet Nam. 2018. 1.8. Virgin Islands (U.S.) · West Bank and Gaza.
The top spending priorities included Social Security, national defense, grants to states and local governments, interest on the debt, and Medicare. These five ...
Summers says the situation facing Powell's Fed is unlike anything in modern history, and says the rate cut shifts the balance of risk more towards inflation ...
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which just passed the Senate and will probably pass the House, will make things even worse.
The primary deficit is the difference between government revenues and spending, excluding interest payments. Learn more about the U.S. ...
If our interest rate costs go up, that exacerbates the fiscal sustainability challenges we face. Let's say a Democrat wins the next presidential ...
The term “bond vigilantes” refers to investors who discipline excessive government spending by demanding higher sovereign debt yields.
Retirees (ages 65 and older) receive $2.7 trillion, or 62 percent of the $4.4 trillion in age-assignable federal outlays, driven mainly by ...
Large amounts of federal debt could “crowd out” investments by the private sector, making the economy less productive and stunting wage ...
Net purchases by private foreign investors were $55.7 billion, and net purchases by foreign official institutions were $7.2 billion. U.S. ...
Today, there isn't a single country that backs its currency with gold. But what are the key differences between a fiat system and a currency backed by gold?
The primary deficit-to-GDP ratio in 2025 was 2.7 percent, a decrease of 0.6 percentage points from the primary deficit- to-GDP ratio reported for 2024 in last ...
In economics, the Laffer curve illustrates a theoretical relationship between rates of taxation and the resulting levels of the government's tax revenue.
Quantitative easing (QE) is a monetary policy action where a central bank purchases predetermined amounts of government bonds, company shares, ...
Mongolia, 1997–2000 ; North Korea, 1975–1990 ; Sri Lanka, 2022, Sri Lankan economic crisis (2019–2024) ; Thailand, 1997–2007, 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Over the past four decades, real interest rates have risen then fallen across the industrialised world. Over the same period, nominal investment rates are.70 pages
Daily Treasury Par Real Yield Curve Rates, Daily Treasury Real Long-Term Rates. Select Time Period. Current Month. 2026. 2025. 2024. For daily ...
The previous survey, conducted as of June 30, 2024, measured the value of total portfolio foreign holdings of U.S. securities at $30,881 billion ...
The breakeven inflation rate represents a measure of expected inflation derived from 10-Year Treasury Constant Maturity Securities.
So although Japan holds the highest debt ratio of any rated sovereign State, it pays among the least interest of Scope's sovereign universe. The ...
The dividend dissipates once countries complete the demographic transition. However, as fertility remains below long-run replacement rates in many countries and ...59 pages
In this report, the Congressional Budget Office analyzes recent changes in property insurance markets and considers alternative insurance products.
The Hutchins Center Fiscal Impact Measure shows how much local, state, and federal tax and spending policy adds to or subtracts from overall economic growth.
With the 0.7% gap CBO projects, the U.S. would need to run a 0.7% of GDP primary surplus to prevent debt-to-GDP from rising indefinitely. This ...
The clear upward climb from 2022:Q3 to 2025:Q2 (purple area) coincides with the commercial emergence of widely used generative AI tools. Notably ...
The structural deficit means impending financial doom through actual budget deficits. It doesn't necessarily mean that.
Establishing a binding fiscal rule that deficits cannot exceed three percent of annual economic output would roughly stabilize the debt as a ...
The velocity of money measures the rate at which currency is exchanged within an economy over a specific period.
Borrowing costs surged an entire percentage point within a week in 2022 as plans to slash taxes and raise borrowing spooked investors at a time ...
Implications. The paper's findings imply that even if a central bank is credibly perceived as being committed to price stability, inflation can emerge when ...
The severely adverse scenario is characterized by a hypothetical severe global recession accompanied by a period of heightened stress in ...
Reports about the Great Wealth Transfer often make eye-opening assertions about the scale of assets set to pass down to younger generations.
In this study, we have synthesized the economic theory of fiscal illusions with macro political theories of public demand for government to generate a.
Many worry that China's ownership of U.S. debt affords China leverage over the US, but this worry stems from a misunderstanding of sovereign debt.
We use the yield curve to predict future GDP growth and recession probabilities. The spread between short- and long-term rates typically correlates with ...
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