Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner traveled last week to the Middle East and Europe to convince foreign investors to keep buying Treasury bills.
No? How about some tasty U.S. debt?
Timothy Geithner, architect of bank, auto and economic rescue plans, has another high-stakes job these days: traveling bond salesman.
If foreign demand for U.S. debt sags, that could drive up interest rates and spell big trouble for an economy hobbled by 9.5 percent unemployment. Higher rates would make it more expensive for consumers to buy homes and cars, and for businesses to finance their operations.
In the worst case scenario, a rush by foreigners to sell their U.S. debt could send the dollar crashing and inflation soaring.
Publicly traded U.S. debt — which excludes deficits the government owes to itself in Social Security and other trust funds — stood at 41 percent of the total economy in 2008. It is projected to climb to 82 percent of the entire economy by 2019.
"If these trends are not reversed, the world will stop buying our debt and the economy will break," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com.
So how is our salesman doing?
When Geithner told a packed auditorium at Peking University that Chinese investments in the U.S. were safe, his comment was greeted by laughter. -- source
What the U.S. needs is a salesman with brass...
Glengarry GlenRoss sales meeting
[NSFW language]
1 comments:
The fact that we have our financial guy traveling around the world to encourage other governments to keep their bonds is incredibly troubling to me.
That should be a warning flag to everyone. And it maybe should have a skull and cross bones on it.
The conclusion I've come to is to get out of debt asap and invest in some wealth securing assets, the dollar is not one of them - it's pretty much a zombie at this point.
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