Living on borrowed time
The US Treasury market has long served as the world’s financial anchor—deep, liquid and reliably stable. That reputation for placidity is becoming harder to sustain*. America is borrowing at a pace that would have seemed extraordinary a generation ago, and the buyers who once absorbed that paper without blinking are quietly stepping away. The scale of the fiscal expansion is astonishing. Publicly held US debt has risen more than fourfold since the global financial crisis and now tops 100% of gross domestic product—a threshold last breached in the aftermath of the second world war. America borrows more than every other...