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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Marketplace · Unemployment filings hit a 55-year low · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

I mean, what if people decide they're not going to buy the bonds or they're going to demand a much higher return in order to buy the bonds?

Well, like I said, we have to sell a lot of bonds to people, and those people are not out there trying to do favors to us.

They want a return, an interest rate, that's commensurate with the risk of our deficits and our inflation.

And if they get a sense that either of those things are going to be much worse in the future, and we've had a lot of troubling signs of that lately, they could decide not to buy the bonds.

We won't see as many investors showing up at auctions.

We might have disruptions in the market.

The people who

We rely on to buy those bonds, whether it's the dealers or the hedge funds having troubles of their own.

Sure.

Well, there's basically two ways to borrow.

You can issue treasury bills, which mature in less than a year, and the interest rates tend to be lower, but the problem is they mature, and then you have to refinance them and go back to the market.

Or you can issue longer-term debt.

The problem is the interest rates are higher.

And if you issue a lot of those bonds, then it tends to make interest rates in the market go up, which then ripples through to mortgage rates, and voters and President Trump don't like that.

And what we've seen for the last few years, and in fairness, this happened under President Biden also, is that even though the deficits are very large, the Treasury has kept down the size of the auctions of long-term bonds because it doesn't want to put upward pressure on long-term interest rates.

But that causes a problem.

It means by relying so much on Treasury bills, more and more of the debt comes due and must be refinanced every month and increases the risk that something goes wrong.

Exactly.

So not only are we coming to market much more often to refinance this debt, but we're asking people who have no long-term commitment as patient holders of that debt to step up and lend us the money.

They do.

Showing 81–100 of 107 · page 5 of 6