Greg Ip
speaker
107 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 20 Aug
Greg Ip’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Sure.
Well, we are running very large deficits.
The largest deficits...
relative to GDP that we've ever run in peacetime on an ongoing basis.
And what that means in practical terms is that every year the Treasury has to come to Wall Street and say, we need to borrow $2 trillion by selling you Treasury bills and Treasury bonds.
And it is getting more and more challenging to sell that debt.
Somebody's got to buy it.
And the nature of the people that buy those bonds has been changing.
There are fewer patient investors, you know, like foreign central banks, and more sort of like impatient investors like hedge funds.
And these are the kinds of people that will trade in and out of markets a lot faster, and they may flee if something goes wrong, such as inflation or a big deficit.
And I think those are things to worry about because if that were to happen, you could get big moves in markets and possibly much higher long-term interest rates.
I think it's absolutely correct.
I mean, with the size of the deficits we're running now, it's getting harder and harder to find ways to raise those funds.
Congress apparently doesn't want to raise taxes.
Congress apparently doesn't want to cut spending.
So where in the world is the extra money going to come from?
But, you know, Kai, there's another risk here, which is that it's not just the inability of the Treasury or the Congress to respond to a crisis because it's so short of money.
What if...
The fiscal situation is itself the cause of the crisis.
What if the Treasury itself is the cause of the crisis?
Showing 61–80 of 107 · page 4 of 6
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