Phantom buyers of Treasury debt

Eric Sprott & David Franklin in their Markets at a Glance calculated that the U.S. government would "need to sell $2.041 trillion in new debt - or almost three times the new debt that was issued in fiscal 2008" to balance its 2009 budget.

But who is in a position to buy so much debt? The writers dug into some government publications and came up with the three biggest buyers:

1. Foreign and International buyers who purchased $697.5 billion.
2. The Federal Reserve who bought $286 billion.
3. The Household Sector who bought $528 billion to Q3 – which puts them on track [to] purchase $704 billion for fiscal 2009.

But wait -- what is "the Household Sector"? For an answer, they turned to the "Federal Reserve Board of Governors Flow of Funds Data which provides a detailed breakdown of the owners of Treasury Securities to Q3 2009." This mysterious group - the Household Sector - bought "35 times more government debt than they did in 2008."

Amazingly, we discovered that the Household Sector is actually just a catch-all category. It represents the buyers left over who can’t be slotted into the other group headings. For most categories of financial assets and liabilities, the values for the Household Sector are calculated as residuals. That is, amounts held or owed by the other sectors are subtracted from known totals, and the remainders are assumed to be the amounts held or owed by the Household Sector. . . So to answer the question - who is the Household Sector? They are a PHANTOM. They don’t exist. They merely serve to balance the ledger in the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds report. . . .

Is this a Ponzi scheme?

As we have seen so illustriously over the past year, all Ponzi schemes eventually fail under their own weight. The US debt scheme is no different. 2009 has been witness to spectacular government intervention in almost all levels of the economy. This support requires outside capital to facilitate, and relies heavily on the US government’s ability to raise money in the debt market. The fact that the Federal Reserve and US Treasury cannot identify the second largest buyer of treasury securities this year proves that the traditional buyers are not keeping pace with the US government’s deficit spending. It makes us wonder if it’s all just a Ponzi scheme.