Who’s buying all that US debt?

As a thought experiment, we separated all the various US Treasury owners and asked our readers whether each group could afford to increase their 2009 treasury purchases by 200 per cent. In the end, we surmised that most groups couldn’t, and prepared our readers for the worst. Almost seven months later, however, nothing particularly bad has happened on the US debt front. There have been no failed auctions, no sovereign defaults, no downgrades of debt and no significant increase in rates: not so much as a hiccup in the treasury market. Knowing what we discussed this past June, we have to ask how it all went so smoothly. After all, it was pretty obvious that there wasn’t enough buying power to satisfy the auctions under ‘normal’ circumstances.