Bipartisan Policy Center Presentation on Debt Limit Analysis

Below is a presentation from the Bipartisan Policy Center who earlier this week put out a release claiming that any "extraordinary measures" that the US Treasury can take to continue to operate while at the "debt ceiling" may expire by mid February rather than the end of that month as previously indicated by the Treasury Secretary:

Debt Limit Analysis


The way I interpret it, it seems that the Treasury is mostly planning on spending for general purposes the balances they receive from scheduled redemptions of the US Treasury securities that the government keeps in the Federal Employee retirement accounts, rather than use those balances to reinvest them in newly issued securities; for a while.

I assume that as the securities presently in the retirement account are redeemed, this will lower the amount of issued Treasury securities and free up some ceiling for Treasury to issue new securities thus providing new balances that can be used for general purposes.  I guess they will maintain some sort of obligation to the retirement fund, but this obligation does not count against the debt ceiling because it is not in the form of an issued Treasury security.

So far this month, in 4 statement days, the Treasury has net spent $95B on net deposits of $70B. A $25B deficit, ie withdrawing $25B more than deposits; but this looks like it was accomplished by drawing down the Cash Account by about this same amount over those 4 days.