How the U.S. Treasury Should Auction Its Debt

Abstract

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis or the Federal Reserve System. Auctions have been around for more than 2,000 years. The Babylonians arranged marriages by auction. The Roman legions sold booty at auction, and on one notable occasion, the Praetorian Guard killed the emperor and put up the whole empire for auction. Today, members of the general public sell at auction such diverse things as tobacco, fish, cut flowers, works of art, thoroughbred horses, and used cars. The U.S. government sells natural resources by auction and may soon take bids on radio airwaves and pollution rights. And in the largest auctions in recorded human history, the U.S. Treasury each year sells roughly $2.5 trillion worth of debt. With such large amounts at stake, even small improvements in the Treasury’s auction procedure can lead to large gains for taxpayers. In this paper,

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 69 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.