Roundup #81: Back to our regular programming

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Hi, folks! My father unfortunately passed away two weeks ago from chemotherapy complications, and as you can imagine, I’ve been busy dealing with that, so posting has been a bit light. My apologies. (I will probably write something about my father on this blog at some point in the near future.) Anyway, there’s tons of stuff happening out there in the world — far too much to fit in a single roundup post — but here are some items I hope you’ll find interesting. 1. The U.S. national debt bombThe U.S. passed a major milestone recently. The ratio of national debt to GDP passed 100% for the first time since World War 2:Source: WSJNote that there are two measures of national debt, and they have names that sound very similar. “Total public debt” is the amount owed by the Treasury, while “Federal debt held by the public” is the amount owed by the Treasury to lenders outside the U.S. federal government itself. If another government agency holds Treasury bonds, that debt counts in “Total public debt”, but not in “Federal debt held by the public”. The one exception is the Fed — if the Fed holds Treasuries, it counts in both debt measures. It’s very confusing, I know. They should probably change those names to make them less similar. Anyway, it’s “Federal debt held by the public” that just passed 100% of GDP for the first time since World War 2. Now, there’s nothing particularly special about the “100% of GDP” marker — it’s just a big round number. The amount of money that the federal government has available to pay back the national debt is tax revenue, not GDP. Debt is currently at a …