19th
Via Chris Martenson’s The US Insolvent article, I found a very interesting paper by Sprott Asset Management covering treasury bond issuance and its potential buyers in 2009: The Solution is … the Problem (pdf).
Key message is that there are not enough buyers for a debt that in 2009 will be three times what was issued in 2008. Buyer of last resort will of course be the Fed and its printing machines.
The paper includes an interesting analysis of all categories of US bonds buyers, from foreign buyers to “intragovernmental holdings”. The fact that the government itself holds $4.2 trillion out of $10.0 trillion of total public debt through entities like “Social Security Trust” whose only assets are government IOUs, as I wrote previously, is the biggest scam ever devised by human mind. For some reason this allowed to not even consider those $4.2 trillion in liabilities in official statistics of US debt/GDP ratios.
