U.S. Budget and Economy

According to a number of news stories, Chinese Premier Wen Jinbao expressed concerns about China's holdings of U.S. government debt on March 13th. Following is the opening paragraph in a March 14th article in the Washington Post : Exerting its new influence as the U.S. government's largest creditor, China yesterday demanded that the Obama administration "guarantee the safety" of its $1 trillion in American bonds as Washington goes further into debt to combat the economic crisis. Further on, the article states: China surpassed Japan last year as the largest foreign holder of Treasury bonds. Any indication that it intends to cease those purchases -- or, worse, stage a sell-off -- could drive up the cost of borrowing for the U.S. government, as well as send mortgage rates higher for millions of Americans. To my knowledge, the chief source for the amounts of Treasuries held by foreign countries is the Treasury Department. Each month, it posts updated estimates of the fo...

An overview of the fiscal year 2010 U.S. Budget was released on Thursday, February 26th. A link to the overview can be found on this page , along with the following description: A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America’s Promise , provides a description of the Obama Administration’s fiscal policies and major budgetary initiatives. This document is an overview of the full Fiscal Year 2010 Budget expected to be released this spring. The overview contains 9 summary tables which give actual budget numbers for 2008 and projected numbers for 2009 through 2019. These numbers can be combined with historical budget numbers from the prior budget to look at historical and projected budget data from 1940 through 2019. The following graph shows selected measures of the deficit since 1970: The most commonly discussed measure of the deficit is the unified deficit, shown in purple. The graph shows the actual values of the unified deficit through 2008 and projected values from 2009 forward. In ...