George Hall on the History of the U.S. National Debt and Government Financing
Macro Musings with David Beckworth
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The History of Public Finance in the United States
The U.S. Treasury measures its debt at its par value and measures its interest payments on the debt essentially by summing up the coupon payments. But that's not the measure that we use as a macroeconomist in our government budget constraints or in our theories. The theories that we have about public finance measured debt at its market value and measure interest payments using the holding period returns. That is just remarkable. They're going out and collecting all that data and making it available to the rest of us. So that must have been a labor of love.
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