Читать книгу Financial Cold War. A View of Sino-US Relations from the Financial Markets онлайн

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The history of the US Treasury securities market as we know it today is surprisingly short. Up until the US entered WW1, there was only around $1 billion of Treasury debt outstanding. New offers were infrequent. The last time before 1917 that Treasury securities were issued was in 1911 to help finance the construction of the Panama Canal.ssss1 Prior to that, the last offering had been in 1900 for the refinancing of bonds that had been issued during the Spanish-American War of 1898.ssss1 Treasury bonds were issued on a project finance basis and required Congressional approval for each issue. Congress would therefore supervise all the terms of each bond, including the interest rate and the maturity. It was not until 1935 when the Roosevelt Administration was engaging in consistent deficit spending to combat the Great Depression that Congress switched to regulating the total value of bonds that could be issued, rather than the specific terms of each issue. In 1939, Congress agreed to turn over decisions regarding the issuance of Treasury securities to the Secretary of the Treasury, limiting itself to specifying only the maximum debt that could be outstanding – the so-called ‘debt ceiling’.