US Debt Maturity Profile AKA, When do we pay for this?

Here’s the update to the other graph I make. I figured I was due for an update after reading this article from Zero Hedge, appropriately titled, “Visualizing The Upcoming Treasury Funding Crisis.” The Fed bought half of the US debt issued in the second quarter of this year. Foreigners have shifted their new allocations toward the short-term debt. Strategically, that makes exiting their treasury positions much easier.

If the dollar continues to weaken, which the Fed just reassured us it would accommodate (key sentence, “The Committee will maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and continues to anticipate that economic conditions are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period.”), then we may face increasing costs to continue government spending. If this were to happen in the next year, it would be catastrophically bad. Any amount of stimulus we actually received out of the government spending would have to be paid back, with interest, before the crisis was over (the theory behind the spending was that we could pay it back when times were good).

Fortunately, another global stock market crash should increase demand for both treasuries and the dollar. Silver lining?

Also, I made you a pie chart so that you could see how much of our debt must be paid back in the next two years.