There is a lot of news lately about the Federal government potentially running up against a debt limit and not being able to keep borrowing. This raises the question of how the government keeps track of debt. http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/ doesn’t explain anything about the information systems used by the Federales. Are we sure that we didn’t blow through the debt limit some months ago? http://www.fms.treas.gov/index.html makes it look as though some efforts are being made to keep track of the cash, but with $16.94 trillion to track, it seems possible that bonds and other obligations could slip through the cracks.
How do we know what we know about the debt?
It indeed seems that we did blow through it, many months ago.
The “Debt to the Penny” page (http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/debt/current) shows the debt as 16,747,419,536,935.48 (i.e. $16.747 trillion). But the debt limit is supposedly $16.699 trillion?
At any rate, that ceiling was reached months ago, since which time Treasury has been using “extraordinary measures” (such as stealing the retirement accounts of government employees) to maintain cash flow. i.e. incurring new debt, without calling it debt. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/perianneboring/2013/09/19/dont-believe-the-hysterics-the-federal-government-will-not-shut-down-if-the-debt-ceiling-isnt-raised/)
But I’m as curious as you to know how they keep track of those pennies.
All Treasuries issued since 1982 have had to be registered, I believe, so at least in theory there’s a giant database saying exactly who owns each and every bond since then (at which point the question becomes whether they can maintain that database any better than they can build a web site). In addition to which, there are apparently close to $100M in unregistered, pre-1982 bearer bonds still outstanding (http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/pd_bearregsec.pdf)
Only savers and producers worry about silly things like “how much the govt owes”. In an era where the Fed prints $1T/yr of base money then loans it to the banking elite for 0.25%, speculators no longer need savers or an economy that produces real goods. So quit worrying, and party like its 1929!
1) FMS is the Bureau responsible for payments and collections for the Treasury, they use many, many systems to do that for all the programs and agencies, from paying Congressmen, to electronic payment cards for sailors on ships. All these systems (ACH, etc) are integrated with a front end to query any of those billions of checks a year. It’s quite a competent office and system. Here are the daily reports: http://fms.treas.gov/dts/index.html
The Fed maintains the General Account out of which (for the most part) the Treasury draws the checks so there is another running total.
2)A separate Bureau of Public Debt handles the payments on Treasury securities.
Finally @phik: You’re right that we blew through the debt ceiling, but that’s not an oversight – recall that the last time we had this fight the debt ceiling wasn’t actually Raised it was “Suspended”.
It seems to me that keeping track of the debt, down to the penny, is just a matter of careful bookkeeping, which can be done with or without computers. But careful bookkeeping systems can be defeated by creative accounting. For example, were payroll tax receipts in the 1985-2005 timeframe treated as “income” which does not have to be repaid, or as “liabilities”, borrowed money against future claims? The answer is that the government’s books treated it as “income”. Without that treatment, the claim that Clinton’s last couple of budgets were balanced falls apart.
For comparison purposes, the relabeling of liabilities as income was the principal mechanism by which Enron’s books were cooked.
I think I’ll start recording my credit card balance as income. That will make me feel better.