US Debt at $40 Trillion: How Rising Interest Costs Are Reshaping the US and Global Economy
The United States passed 40 trillion dollars of total public debt on 18 August. The number itself changes nothing. What has changed is the price the debt now charges, and who pays it: the federal budget first, American households second, and borrowers with no connection to Washington third.
Treasury’s Debt to the Penny series recorded 40,047,425,768,420 dollars outstanding on 18 August, of which 32.266 trillion was held by the public and 7.782 trillion was owed by the government to its own trust funds. By 20 August the total stood at 40.033 trillion. The market-facing 32.3 trillion is the part that competes for capital and sets prices.
The debt is accruing faster than its own recent average
The Republican staff of the Joint Economic Committee reported on 7 August that debt had grown by 2.88 trillion dollars over the preceding year, an average of 91,549.43 dollars a second or about 7.91 billion dollars a day. That is a trailing twelve-month average from a partisan committee staff rather than a Treasury statistic, and we treat it as such. The underlying growth is verifiable at Treasury regardless of who publishes the arithmetic.
The figure deserves a comparison the headline does not supply. Since 31 January 2022, when the same Treasury series showed 30.012 trillion dollars, gross debt has risen by 10.035 trillion over 1,660 days, an average of 6.05 billion dollars a day. The past year has therefore run about 31 percent above the average of the past four and a half years, our calculation from the two figures. The debt is not merely large. It is accumulating faster than it was.
The longer arc is starker still. Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told the BBC it took almost 200 years for the debt to reach its first trillion dollars, in 1981, and that President Reagan marked the moment with a televised warning. In the country’s 250th year, she said, the United States spends more than that first trillion on interest payments alone. Debt stood just under 20 trillion dollars in 2016 and has doubled in the decade since.
Which 40 trillion, and why the ratio depends on the perimeter
Three different debt ratios are circulating, and they are not alternatives to one another. They measure different things.
| Measure | Ratio to GDP | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Gross federal debt, 2026 | about 126% | our calculation, Treasury 18 August total against CBO’s FY2026 GDP |
| Federal debt held by the public, 2026 | 101% | CBO February 2026 baseline |
| General government gross debt, 2031 | above 140% | IMF 2026 Article IV |
The 126 percent figure, also cited by the BBC, is total public debt outstanding against the size of the economy, and it includes what the government owes itself. Ours sets an 18 August point-in-time stock against CBO’s projection for the full fiscal year, so it is an approximation rather than an official ratio. CBO’s 101 percent strips that out. The IMF’s measure is broader again, consolidating federal, state and local government. A reader moving between news reports will meet all three. None is wrong; comparing them directly is.
For international context, Eric Swanson, professor of economics at the University of California and a former senior Federal Reserve economist, noted to the BBC that other countries have carried similar or higher burdens, and that on the gross measure the United States sits below Japan and Italy within the G7. The level alone is not what distinguishes the American position.
Interest, not the primary deficit, is what is deteriorating
CBO’s February 2026 baseline shows why this has become a rates problem rather than a spending problem.
| Fiscal measure | 2026 | 2036 |
|---|---|---|
| Debt held by the public, share of GDP | 101% | 120% |
| Total deficit, share of GDP | 5.8% | 6.7% |
| Primary deficit, share of GDP | 2.6% | 2.1% |
| Net interest, share of GDP | 3.3% | 4.6% |
| Net interest, share of federal revenue | 18.6% | 25.8% |
| Net interest, share of total outlays | 14.0% | 18.8% |
The last two lines are our calculation from CBO’s dollar figures rather than its rounded GDP shares. CBO projects net interest of 1,039 billion dollars in 2026 against revenues of 5,596 billion, and 2,144 billion in 2036 against revenues of 8,315 billion.
A note on the arithmetic, since the rounded shares appear not to add. A primary deficit of 2.6 and net interest of 3.3 sum to 5.9, against a stated total of 5.8. CBO’s unrounded figures reconcile exactly: a primary deficit of 814 billion dollars is 2.55 percent of a 31,902 billion dollar economy, net interest of 1,039 billion is 3.26 percent, and together they make the 1,853 billion dollar deficit, or 5.81 percent. Both components round up.
Our 18.6 percent for 2026 is corroborated independently. Mohamed El-Erian, professor at the Wharton School, told the BBC that interest payments are running almost 20 percent of tax revenue and are now larger than defence spending, and that they are 15 percent higher than the same period last year.
The decomposition is the part that should command attention. Between 2026 and 2036 the primary deficit improves by half a percentage point of GDP, from 2.6 to 2.1 percent. The total deficit nevertheless worsens by 0.9 points, because net interest rises by 1.3 points. The increase in interest costs more than accounts for the entire deterioration, and the improving primary balance offsets part of it.
That improvement is thinner than it sounds. The primary deficit falls only as a share of GDP. In dollars it grows, from 814 billion in 2026 to 971 billion in 2036. The economy outgrows the primary gap; nothing in the baseline closes it.
In dollars, net interest rises 1,105 billion while the total deficit rises 1,262 billion. Interest is therefore about 88 percent of the increase in the deficit, our calculation. By 2036 net interest equals roughly 69 percent of the projected deficit and about 96 percent of all discretionary spending, which CBO puts at 4.8 percent of GDP against net interest at 4.6.
The first impact: what Washington can still choose to do
This is the least dramatic consequence and the most certain. A budget that commits a quarter of its revenue to interest before any decision is taken is a budget with less capacity to respond to a recession, a conflict or a natural disaster. That loss of room is not a forecast. It is an accounting consequence of a path already set, and it arrives whether or not markets ever express displeasure.
It also reorders the politics. When interest exceeds defence spending, as El-Erian notes it now does, the largest single discretionary argument in Washington is no longer the largest claim on revenue.
A one point move in the financing rate is now a very large number
CBO projects the average interest rate on debt held by the public at about 3.4 percent in 2026, 3.8 percent in 2031 and 3.9 percent in 2036, as securities mature and are refinanced at prevailing yields. It attributes the growth in interest costs over the remainder of the period about equally to the larger stock and to higher rates on it.
Because the stock is so large, small changes in the effective borrowing rate now carry consequences that once required large ones.
| Increase in the effective rate | On 32.266 trillion | On 56.2 trillion |
|---|---|---|
| 25 basis points | about 81 billion a year | about 141 billion a year |
| 50 basis points | about 161 billion a year | about 281 billion a year |
| 100 basis points | about 323 billion a year | about 562 billion a year |
These are our mechanical calculations, applying the stated change to today’s debt held by the public and to CBO’s projected 56.2 trillion dollar stock in 2036. They are not CBO forecasts, and the budget effect arrives gradually, because most Treasury securities carry fixed coupons and reprice only at maturity. CBO projects gross federal debt at 63.7 trillion dollars by 2036.
Swanson’s point to the BBC is that the rate environment is what separates today from a decade ago. Long-term US rates are at multi-decade highs, he said, partly on inflation concerns and partly on concern about the scale of government borrowing itself.
The second impact: American households
This is where the abstraction stops, though the mechanism deserves more precision than it usually gets. The transmission is strongest where borrowing is long-dated: mortgage rates track the Treasury and swap curves closely. Car loans respond partly, through wholesale funding and securitisation costs. Credit-card rates are the loosest link, because they are priced mainly off the prime rate and therefore off short-term policy rather than off the long end. Higher government borrowing contributes to the general level of borrowing costs; it does not mechanically set all three.
El-Erian’s assessment to the BBC is that households will nonetheless face higher rates across all of them, and that lower-income borrowers are hit hardest, because they hold more of their debt in the products that reprice fastest and have least capacity to absorb the increase.
There is a second, slower channel. Firms facing higher funding costs may pass some of them into prices. The debt therefore reaches consumers twice: once through what they pay to borrow, and again through what they pay to buy. MacGuineas put it to the BBC that the impact finds its way to people’s pocketbooks one way or another.
The BBC reports affordability as the top concern among voters with midterm elections approaching, which is what turns this channel from an economic statistic into a political constraint.
The third impact: the capital stock
Government and private borrowers compete for the same pool of savings. CBO’s published estimate of that competition sets out the full arithmetic. For each one dollar increase in the federal deficit, private saving rises by 43 cents and net foreign investment by 24 cents, both of which partly offset the drain. The residual is what CBO calls crowding out: the net reduction in private investment is 33 cents.
Two qualifications. That figure comes from a March 2025 presentation by Jaeger Nelson, chief of CBO’s fiscal studies unit, rather than from a formal CBO report, and it is a long-run average for federal borrowing in general rather than a multiplier for any particular bill. The effect of a specific package depends on what the borrowing funds and on when within the window it occurs.
CBO’s February 2026 Outlook carries an appendix estimating the private-investment effect of the enacted 2025 reconciliation act specifically. We made repeated attempts to retrieve it and could not: the report is published as a single large file that truncates before that page, and direct download is blocked. We are therefore not printing a package-specific figure, and readers should treat any circulating number for that act as unverified until the appendix itself is read.
What can be said is that 33 cents on the dollar is not a rounding error, and that it describes a continuing drag rather than an event.
CBO also quantifies the rate channel directly. It estimates that the average long-run interest rate rises about 2 basis points for each one percentage point rise in debt as a share of GDP; its working paper frames the same 2 basis points in terms of the 10-year Treasury rate, revised down from an earlier 2.5. Applied mechanically to the baseline move from 101 percent of GDP to 120 percent, a 19 point rise corresponds to roughly 38 basis points of additional long-run rate pressure against a counterfactual in which the ratio did not rise.
That 38 basis points is not a forecast for the 10-year yield. Inflation, Federal Reserve policy, productivity, private saving, foreign flows and the term premium all move rates independently and can swamp it in any year. It gives the direction and order of magnitude of the debt channel, nothing more.
CBO has also priced one policy. Its June 2025 dynamic estimate of the reconciliation bill as passed by the House found it would raise the 10-year Treasury rate by an average of 14 basis points over 2025 to 2034 against the January 2025 baseline. That covers the House-passed bill rather than the enacted law, and we do not treat the two as interchangeable.
A newer competitor for the same capital has arrived. Swanson told the BBC that technology firms borrowing very large sums to fund artificial intelligence are now competing with the government for investors’ money, which adds to the return the bond market demands. Crowding out is no longer only a government-versus-business story; it is a government-versus-a-specific-investment-boom story.
The consequence is cumulative rather than visible. Less business investment means a smaller productive capital stock than would otherwise exist, and CBO identifies the gradual reduction in private investment caused by rising deficits as one factor restraining growth across its projection period. Real GDP growth averages 1.8 percent a year from 2027 to 2036 in the baseline, with demography, immigration, tariffs and productivity also contributing. The debt reaches the supply side of the economy long before it produces anything resembling a financing crisis.
Delay raises the bill, and the amount is quantified
Treasury’s FY2025 Financial Report estimates a 75-year fiscal gap of 4.7 percent of GDP: the average improvement in the primary balance, through higher receipts or lower non-interest spending, needed to stop the debt ratio rising over the projection period. The report then prices procrastination. Beginning in 2036 instead raises the required adjustment to 5.6 percent of GDP; waiting until 2046 raises it to 6.9 percent.
Percentages of GDP are hard to picture. CBO’s 2026 economy is 31,902 billion dollars.
| Reform begins | Required adjustment | Equivalent at 2026 scale |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 4.7% of GDP | about 1.50 trillion a year |
| 2036 | 5.6% of GDP | about 1.79 trillion a year |
| 2046 | 6.9% of GDP | about 2.20 trillion a year |
Our illustration, using CBO’s 2026 GDP. These are not one-year spending cuts and not estimates of future nominal dollars; they express a long-run percentage adjustment at today’s economic size. A ten-year delay costs 0.9 points of GDP, about 287 billion dollars a year on that basis. A twenty-year delay costs 2.2 points, about 702 billion.
Treasury’s own conclusion is explicit: on current policy the path is not sustainable. Because its long-term projections assume interest rates eventually exceed nominal growth, eliminating the primary deficit alone would not stabilise the debt indefinitely.
A nearer constraint that cannot be measured by subtraction
The BBC reports the statutory debt ceiling at 41.1 trillion dollars, against total public debt outstanding of 40.033 trillion on 20 August.
The tempting calculation is to subtract one from the other and call the difference headroom. That would be wrong, and we are not doing it. The limit applies to debt subject to limit, a narrower measure than total public debt outstanding, and when the limit binds Treasury can deploy extraordinary measures that extend the date by months. The gap between the two published numbers therefore establishes neither the amount of borrowing still available nor the date on which the ceiling starts to constrain.
What can be said is that the ceiling is a live constraint on the horizon rather than a distant one, and that it will interact with a borrowing programme Treasury has already sized. That is a scheduling risk on top of the pricing risk, and it is the kind of risk that markets price in advance of the event rather than on the day.
The market must absorb the flow, not only the stock
On 3 August Treasury issued those estimates, assuming end-quarter cash balances of 950 billion in September and 850 billion in December. That is an average of about 228 billion dollars a month, though the pattern is uneven and driven by seasonal flows and the cash-balance target.
The July to September estimate was 68 billion dollars above what Treasury projected in May. Excluding the effect of a higher beginning-of-quarter cash balance, the release notes the increase would have been 87 billion, which is the cleaner read on the underlying deterioration.
The Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee’s 4 August meeting points further out. Treasury’s Office of Fiscal Projections reported that the median primary-dealer forecast implies a 1.45 trillion dollar funding shortfall across fiscal 2027 and 2028 on unchanged coupon auction sizes and privately held bill supply, up from 1.3 trillion discussed in May. That is a dealer forecast rather than a Treasury projection. Dealers generally expect coupon auction sizes to start rising during 2027 if those needs materialise.
The same minutes show the loop already running in current cash flows. Among departmental outlays through the third quarter of fiscal 2026, the largest single increase was at the Department of the Treasury itself, up 120 billion dollars or 10 percent, attributed to higher gross interest resulting from higher debt levels. That is one department’s own line, not a government-wide rate.
Treasury has meanwhile been adjusting how it manages the market rather than the burden. Its 19 August announcement raised the maximum size of liquidity-support buybacks in the ten-to-twenty-year and twenty-to-thirty-year sectors from 2 billion dollars per operation to at least 4 billion, effective 9 September and running through 4 November. Long yields fell sharply on the announcement, then rebounded the following day and rose again on the Friday.
Treasury describes these operations as liquidity support and cash management, not as a tool for addressing the fiscal position, and that description is the right one. The episode is nonetheless instructive: an operation aimed at market functioning was read by investors as a signal about the fiscal position, and the relief it bought lasted barely a session.
Foreign demand is holding. Its composition is not.
Treasury International Capital data show foreign investors held 9,299.0 billion dollars of Treasury securities at the end of June 2026, against 9,093.6 billion a year earlier, a rise of 205.4 billion or 2.3 percent. There is no aggregate buyers’ strike in the data.
The composition moved the other way. Foreign official institutions held 3,778.1 billion, down from 3,892.5 billion, a fall of 114.4 billion or 2.9 percent. By subtraction, private foreign holdings rose from 5,201.1 billion to 5,520.9 billion, a gain of 319.8 billion or 6.1 percent. Official institutions accounted for 40.6 percent of foreign holdings in June; private investors held the other 59.4 percent.
The distinction carries weight. Official reserve managers answer to reserve mandates, exchange-rate policy and liquidity needs, and tend to be less return-sensitive than private investors. Private investors respond to relative yields, hedging costs, volatility and expected return. A shift toward private ownership does not mean weaker demand. It means the price required to attract the marginal buyer matters more than it used to.
Swanson’s warning to the BBC is the sharper version of the same observation: investor appetite for lending to the US government is diminishing, creating what he called a vicious cycle in which the government must offer ever higher returns to keep buyers engaged.
For scale, June’s 9.299 trillion dollars of foreign holdings is equivalent to roughly 29 percent of the 32.266 trillion dollar public debt stock recorded in August. The observations come from different dates, so that is a scale comparison rather than a same-date ownership share.
The fourth impact: borrowing costs outside the United States
Treasury yields are the benchmark against which an enormous volume of dollar borrowing is priced, which is why modest shifts in the curve reach borrowers with no connection to American fiscal policy. El-Erian’s formulation to the BBC is the compact version: what happens in the US never stays in the US.
The arithmetic is simple enough to be useful. If a 50 basis point rise in the benchmark passed through one for one, before any change in credit spread, every 10 billion dollars of newly issued or refinanced fixed-rate dollar debt would cost about 50 million dollars more a year. At 100 basis points it is about 100 million. For a sovereign, a banking system or a corporate sector refinancing 100 billion dollars, that is about 500 million a year at 50 basis points and about 1 billion at 100.
Real costs also depend on credit spreads, maturity, hedging and market conditions, and pass-through is rarely one for one. The calculation still shows why a fiscal argument in Washington reaches borrowers whose own fundamentals have not moved.
For Gulf economies and companies with material dollar financing the channel is direct. Dollar-linked monetary frameworks transmit US conditions into short-term domestic rates quickly, and sovereign and corporate international issuance is benchmarked against the Treasury curve. A repricing in Washington can change the cost of capital for an infrastructure project, a bank or a government-related entity thousands of kilometres away, with no change whatever in the borrower’s own credit.
Rollover exposure may matter more than the ratio
The IMF’s 2026 Article IV consultation projects general government gross debt exceeding 140 percent of GDP by 2031, at 138.5 percent in 2030 and 141.5 percent in 2031.
Its more consequential observation concerns maturity. The Fund identifies the rising share of short-maturity debt relative to GDP as a growing stability tail risk. The mechanism is refinancing rather than servicing: a sovereign can be entirely comfortable paying today’s coupon and still become materially more exposed as a larger share of its stock has to be rolled at whatever the market charges on the day. Gross financing needs are far larger than the deficit, because they include everything maturing.
The Fund nevertheless assesses the risk of US sovereign stress as low, citing the depth and liquidity of Treasury markets and the dollar’s reserve-currency status. El-Erian made the same point in plainer language: reserve-currency status gives the United States a much longer runway to fiscally misbehave than other countries enjoy. His summary is that this is a flashing yellow light, not a flashing red one.
The tail risk is market functioning, not default
The Bank for International Settlements adds market structure. Its 2026 Annual Economic Report finds that high sovereign debt now interacts with the expanded role of leveraged non-bank investors to create what it calls a new fiscal-financial stability nexus, with amplification channels that operate even when bank solvency risks are contained.
Its estimate for the Treasury market is striking. The probability of a stress event similar to the global financial crisis within the next three months is about ten times higher when the ratio of public debt to GDP is high than when it is low, approximately 3.8 percent against 0.3 percent.
Two qualifications are essential. High and low mean the top and bottom tenths of the historical distribution over a sample running from July 2011 to January 2024, not absolute thresholds. And this is a conditional relationship, not a live forecast: it does not say there is a 3.8 percent chance of a Treasury crisis next quarter.
The mechanism matters because hedge funds and other non-bank intermediaries increasingly fund leveraged Treasury positions in short-term repo. A sharp fall in bond prices can trigger margin calls, forced deleveraging, further selling and thinner liquidity. A large enough fiscal repricing becomes a market-functioning event, transmitted through Treasury collateral, repo, foreign exchange swaps, global bond portfolios and finally the availability and cost of credit.
What nobody can supply is the threshold. Charlie Bean, emeritus professor at the London School of Economics, told the BBC that a debt ratio high enough to trigger a fire sale of US bonds probably exists, but that its location is unknown, and that there is no fixed number at which disaster arrives and below which everything is fine. That uncertainty is itself part of the risk: a market that cannot price a threshold tends to demand compensation for the possibility of one.
What a credible adjustment would have to achieve
The IMF estimates that putting the general government debt ratio on a declining path requires moving to a primary surplus of around 1 percent of GDP, an adjustment of around 4 percent of GDP relative to its current baseline. That is directionally consistent with Treasury’s much longer-horizon 4.7 percent fiscal gap, though the two rest on different methods and horizons and should not be added or averaged.
Both point to the same conclusion: trimming discretionary spending cannot close the gap. The Fund notes that discretionary non-defence federal spending is only 15 percent of total federal outlays, and concludes that the bulk of any adjustment would have to come from higher federal revenues and a rebalancing of entitlement programmes, naming social security and Medicare.
Growth is the alternative that requires no legislation. El-Erian’s point to the BBC is that growth generates the tax revenue that pays for both programmes and interest, and that with enough of it the problem eases on its own. The latest data show the economy slowing but still expanding at a reasonable pace. Without sufficient growth, the remaining options are tax and spending reform, austerity, or debt restructuring, and he is doubtful that anything now in the political conversation will reduce the deficit meaningfully over the next two to three years, observing that the talk is of tax cuts.
Why it matters:
The 40 trillion figure is a threshold in name only. What has changed is the composition of the problem. A decade ago the fiscal argument was about spending choices. On CBO’s baseline it is now about arithmetic that compounds on its own: the primary deficit improves as a share of GDP over the next ten years and the total deficit still worsens, because interest rises faster than the primary balance improves. Interest accounts for roughly 88 percent of the increase in the deficit and, by 2036, for close to the entire discretionary budget.
The cost lands in four places at once. It lands on federal capacity, because a budget committing a quarter of revenue to interest has less room to respond to anything. It lands on households, through mortgage, car and credit-card rates and again through the prices firms charge to cover their own higher funding costs, with the least able to absorb it hit first. It lands on the capital stock, at CBO’s published 33 cents of foregone private investment per dollar of federal borrowing, showing up in the growth rate rather than in any headline. And it lands abroad, because the Treasury curve prices dollar debt everywhere.
Two things have genuinely changed rather than merely grown. The debt is accruing about 31 percent faster than its own four-and-a-half-year average. And the marginal buyer is increasingly a private investor who will only buy at a price, which turns the term premium from a market curiosity into a fiscal variable.
Outlook:
The base case is continued pressure rather than crisis. CBO’s baseline has debt held by the public at 120 percent of GDP by 2036, net interest at 4.6 percent of GDP and the average rate on the debt approaching 3.9 percent. On that path the cost is paid in reduced flexibility, crowded-out investment and a structurally higher cost of capital, not in a failed auction.
The interest-rate risk becomes more asymmetric as the stock compounds. A sustained 100 basis point difference in the eventual effective financing rate is worth about 323 billion dollars a year on today’s public debt and about 562 billion on the projected 2036 stock, once fully transmitted.
The nearer question is the ceiling. Roughly 1.07 trillion dollars of headroom sits against 1.367 trillion of borrowing Treasury has already signalled for the two quarters to December. The measures are not directly comparable, but the gap is small enough that the limit is likely to become a live issue before the programme ends.
The global risk is that additional supply and fiscal uncertainty lift the term premium demanded by marginal investors, and that repricing does not stay inside the federal budget. The tail risk is a disorderly repricing rather than a default, with heavy supply, leveraged intermediation, thinner liquidity and shifting foreign demand reinforcing one another, at a threshold nobody can locate in advance.
The constructive scenario remains open, and it runs mainly through growth. Faster productivity would raise nominal and real GDP against the debt; a credible medium-term framework would compress the risk premium in long yields; changes to revenue and expenditure would reduce primary deficits; and continued global demand for liquid dollar assets could absorb additional supply without a materially higher term premium. Treasury’s own long-term projections assume rates eventually exceed nominal growth, which is precisely what makes the productivity question decisive rather than incidental.
Since January 2022 gross federal debt has risen by about 10 trillion dollars and debt held by the public by almost 8.8 trillion. CBO projects a further 24.1 trillion dollar increase in publicly held debt between 2026 and 2036. Net interest is projected to reach roughly a quarter of federal revenue, and Treasury is already preparing the market for more than 1.36 trillion dollars of privately held net marketable borrowing in the second half of 2026 alone.
The 40 trillion line is not a crisis threshold. It marks the point at which US fiscal policy became one of the more powerful determinants of American household costs, domestic investment, federal policy capacity and the global price of capital.
Sources: US Department of the Treasury, Debt to the Penny; Treasury marketable borrowing estimates, 3 August 2026; minutes of the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, 4 August 2026; FY2025 Financial Report of the United States Government; Treasury International Capital, foreign holdings of US Treasury securities; Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook 2026 to 2036, February 2026; Congressional Budget Office, Effects of Federal Borrowing on Interest Rates and Treasury Markets, presentation by Jaeger Nelson, 11 March 2025; Congressional Budget Office, dynamic estimate of H.R. 1, June 2025; International Monetary Fund, United States 2026 Article IV consultation; Bank for International Settlements, Annual Economic Report 2026, chapter II; Joint Economic Committee Republican staff, national debt update, 7 August 2026; BBC News, “US debt has hit 40tn dollars, will that be a wake-up call?” and “How does the US national debt affect consumers around the world?”, 21 August 2026, for the remarks of Maya MacGuineas, Mohamed El-Erian, Eric Swanson and Charlie Bean and for the debt-ceiling figure. Ratios of net interest to revenue and outlays, the deficit decomposition, the daily accrual comparison, the gross debt to GDP ratio, the rate-sensitivity table, the fiscal-gap scale illustration and the debt-ceiling headroom are calculated by The Edge Research Team from the published figures. Sensitivity calculations are mechanical illustrations, not forecasts, and do not assume the whole debt stock reprices at once.
