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’.
To finance its participation in WW1, Woodrow Wilson's administration issued five ‘Liberty Loans’ totalling $21.4 billion, with maturities between four and 30 years. The government debt was gradually reduced during the 1920s and, by the time Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, the outstanding public debt stood at around $20 billion, or 20 percent of GDP.78 From there, the size of the US deficit continued to grow through WW2 and peaked at 119 percent of GDP at the end of the war.79 Each US administration since then has added to the balance of US Treasury debt outstanding. However, as America enjoyed strong economic growth, the debt as a percentage of GDP steadily declined to 24.6 percent of GDP in 1974.80 From that point on, however, slower economic growth and rising government expenditure saw the US national debt grow at a much faster pace than the economy.
It's not just the government that has continually spent more than it earns; American consumers have done so too. This might never have been possible without an audacious deal negotiated by former Treasury Secretary William Simon to ensure a stable source of funding from overseas.
Born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1927, William Edward Simon was the son of an insurance executive. Handsome and athletic, he served in the US Army before attending Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. Upon graduation in 1952, he headed to Wall Street, where he eventually became the partner in charge of the Government and Municipal Bond Departments at Salomon Brothers. The chain-smoking Simon became Deputy Secretary of the Treasury in January 1973 and launched the Federal Energy Administration to address the energy crisis at the height of the Arab oil embargo. He was appointed Treasury Secretary in May 1974, after George Shultz resigned from the Nixon Administration.
In mid-1974, the economic outlook for the US was dire. The oil embargo had quadrupled oil prices and inflation soared, even as unemployment was rising. For the oil exporters, however, the sharp rise in oil prices had been a bonanza. In 1974, members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had a balance of payments surplus of $67 billion.81 None benefited more than Saudi Arabia which, with the largest reserves of oil in the world, enjoyed a surge in its wealth. Bedouin shepherds, whose fathers and grandfathers had ridden across the desert on camel back with Ibn Saud, were suddenly driving Datsun pick-up trucks, propelling Nissan to the number one spot in vehicle sales in the country.
On an overcast morning in July 1974, the newly appointed Treasury Secretary boarded an 8am flight from Andrews Air Force Base to embark on a secret mission. The official purpose of his two-week trip was to conduct a tour of economic diplomacy across Europe and the Middle East. However, the real mission that he and President Nixon had agreed was to take place during a four-day layover in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. His objectives were to neutralise oil as an economic weapon and to persuade King Faisal to help finance America's rising government deficits with his country's newfound oil wealth.
On the surface, the outspoken former bond salesman seemed uniquely ill-suited for such a delicate diplomatic assignment. Just a week before his trip to Saudi Arabia, Simon had publicly called the Shah of Iran, a close US ally, a ‘nut’. Nevertheless, his earlier career had given him an appreciation of the appeal of US Treasury debt and why this would be attractive to the Saudis.
Up until that point, Saudi Arabia had been parking its petrodollar surpluses in the Eurobond market. However, the emerging market government and corporate debt that featured prominently in that market exposed the Saudi Treasury to credit risks, and those securities were far less liquid than those issued by the US government.
It took several months of negotiations after Simon's initial trip, but the US and Saudi Arabia finally reached a deal. The US agreed to buy oil and to provide the kingdom with military aid and equipment, while Saudi Arabia promised to invest billions of its petrodollar surpluses into US Treasuries to finance US government spending.
At the last minute, King Faisal demanded one key final term: that the country's purchases of US Treasuries should remain strictly secret. The US had offended Arab sensibilities just a year before with its military support to Israel, so publicity around this deal might have been embarrassing to the kingdom. The bearer nature of Eurobonds allowed the country to keep its holdings secret, and it sought the same anonymity for its investments in US Treasuries. Under the arrangement agreed between the US Treasury and Saudi Arabia, the Saudis were allowed to bypass the normal competitive bidding process for buying Treasuries and the sales were excluded from the official auction totals. By 1977, Saudi Arabia had accumulated around 20 percent of all Treasuries held overseas. Remarkably, this arrangement remained secret for over four decades until a dogged journalist from Bloomberg News uncovered it through a Freedom of Information Act request in 2016.
Arguably, Saudi Arabia would have received a better return if it had invested in equities or in higher-yielding bonds. However, William Simon's instincts about the attractiveness of the safety and liquidity of US Treasuries had been spot on. What is more, what the Saudi regime received in return was far more valuable than the financial yield on its holdings. Under what would become known as the Carter Doctrine, the 39th president proclaimed in January 1980:
Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.
The Carter Doctrine was, in fact, a public renewal of a commitment that Harry Truman had made in a letter to King Ibn Saud in October 1950 that the US ‘is interested in the preservation and territorial integrity of Saudi Arabia’.82 America's increased thirst for Middle East oil by the 1970s committed it even more to maintaining security and stability in Saudi Arabia. William Simon's deal provided the financial means for the US to uphold that commitment.
This oil-for-dollars-for-Treasuries agreement was an early example of a type of vendor-financing arrangement that the US has effectively entered into with almost all major surplus countries with which it runs balance of payments deficits. As China emerged as an export juggernaut in the early 2000s, it too would accumulate large balances of US government securities, with holdings of US Treasuries peaking at $1.3 trillion in 2011, or just over nine percent of the US national debt at the time.83
These vendor-financing relationships have become politically controversial, as they are also seen as a means for large exporters to artificially hold down the value of their own currencies (by selling them to buy large amounts of dollars) in order to maintain their export competitiveness. Meanwhile, blue collar wages in the US have stagnated and manufacturing operations have been relocated to lower-cost countries. Equally, for large holders of dollar-denominated securities, continually growing US deficits have raised fears that the US would devalue their holdings through currency depreciation or higher inflation – or both.
Ironically, however, the huge amount of US Treasuries outstanding has enhanced the perception about their safety. In times of market turbulence, investors flock to US Treasuries because they are the most liquid asset class and are, in fact, safer than holding cash in the bank. In the US, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC),
