Measuring $40 Trillion in U.S. Treasury Debt: A Verifiable Indicator System for the “Dollar World”

By Scott Shields – Contributing Writer – Capitol Times Media - From Conversations and Material of Zhu Weisha. Learn more about Zhu Weisha here at Capitol Times Media's July Magazine Issue

Weisha Zhu, Scott Shields

August 27, 2026

A recent Morgan Stanley report on roughly $40 trillion in U.S. federal debt revived an old question: Is the United States issuing too much debt?

The question looks simple, but it is difficult to answer. It took the United States roughly 240 years, from its founding to around 2016, for federal debt to accumulate to about $20 trillion. In the following decade, another roughly $20 trillion was added.

Forty trillion dollars is unquestionably a very large number. But size alone does not tell us how close the system is to danger.

Morgan Stanley’s analysis goes further than simply saying that “$40 trillion is too much.” Yet a more basic question remains: why do we mainly use the U.S. government’s own balance sheet to assess U.S. Treasury debt?

The dollar and U.S. Treasuries are closely connected, but their influence has long extended far beyond the United States, forming a dollar-centered ecosystem that spans global finance.

If that is the case, we should not assess Treasury risk with only one ruler—U.S. debt divided by U.S. GDP. We need a set of indicators capable of measuring the broader dollar ecosystem and then place the $40 trillion inside that system and measure it.

This article does not try to predict the exact day on which a Treasury crisis might occur. It asks a more fundamental question:

What ruler should we use to measure U.S. Treasury debt?

The first task is to build the ruler. The precise definitions, thresholds, and weights still need to be calibrated gradually with historical data.

1. The Cost of Treasury Financing Matters More Than the Headline Debt Total

U.S. Treasury issuance is first of all a market-demand problem. If a bond can be sold, there is demand for it. The real question is not whether anyone will buy it, but how high a yield the U.S. government must pay before the market is willing to absorb additional issuance. If 4 percent is insufficient, 4.5 percent clears the auction, and 5 percent brings in abundant demand, then the market has already priced that new debt.

Headline totals of $40 trillion, $50 trillion, or even $60 trillion still matter, but the marginal financing price is closer to the point at which stress actually appears.

A rapid rise in long-term Treasury yields raises mortgage rates, corporate borrowing costs, and other long-term financing costs, while also compressing equity valuations. In that sense, its tightening effect resembles a Federal Reserve rate hike. But the mechanisms are not identical. The Fed mainly controls short-term policy rates, while long-term yields also contain expectations for growth and inflation, term premia, and Treasury supply and demand. We therefore cannot look only at the fact that rates rose; we must ask why they rose.

This is also why equities are so sensitive to Treasury yields. Stocks price the future. When long-term financing costs jump, markets immediately recalculate future profits and valuations and naturally ask whether the AI story of high growth, high profits, and high valuations can still hold.

Bad news can therefore quickly acquire trading value. When U.S. equities move, global equities, exchange rates, and capital flows also react. In this sense, Treasury yields themselves are important price indicators for the dollar ecosystem.

More informative than the debt total alone are long-term real rates, the term premium, Treasury auction tails, net foreign purchases, the share taken by primary dealers, and the Treasury convenience yield.

The “convenience yield” can be understood simply as the amount of interest investors are willing to forgo because Treasuries are exceptionally safe, liquid, easy to pledge as collateral, and widely accepted by global financial institutions.

A 2026 NBER study finds that the convenience value of the dollar and the convenience value of U.S. Treasuries have diverged in recent years: the global financial system still places a high value on the dollar, while the special convenience of medium- and long-term U.S. Treasuries relative to other advanced-economy government bonds has declined.[1] A falling convenience yield does not mean that “nobody will buy Treasuries.” It means that investors are willing to sacrifice less yield for Treasuries’ special safety, liquidity, and collateral functions, so the marginal cost of financing may rise.

2. The Dollar Is More Than a Currency; It Also Forms an Ecosystem

Why do U.S. Treasuries have a special position among government bonds? Not because the Federal Reserve possesses a money-creation technology unavailable to other central banks. The People’s Bank of China can create renminbi, the European Central Bank can create euros, the Bank of Japan can create yen, and the Federal Reserve can create dollars. From the technical perspective of central-bank balance sheets, there is no fundamental difference. The real difference is that a very large share of global economic activity already uses dollars.

When foreign central banks hold U.S. Treasuries and later need dollar liquidity, eligible official institutions can use the Federal Reserve’s FIMA Repo Facility to temporarily exchange Treasuries held in custody at the New York Fed for dollars, with an agreement to repurchase them later. The transaction is conducted entirely in dollars; there is no need first to sell the Treasuries for another currency and then exchange that currency into dollars.[2] For eligible official institutions, therefore, a Treasury security is not merely an interest-bearing claim on the U.S. government. It is also an asset that can be converted rapidly into foundational dollar liquidity.

On this foundation, a dollar-centered financial ecosystem has developed that covers global trade settlement, financial settlement, foreign-exchange reserves, bank funding, bond financing, cross-border investment, asset pricing, repo collateral, derivatives margin, safe-asset reserves, and crisis-liquidity support. The dollar is one of the system’s principal units of account, payment, and settlement, while Treasuries simultaneously serve as reserve assets, safe assets, and key collateral. This is one of the major differences between U.S. Treasuries and ordinary government bonds.

Treasuries are an indispensable part of the dollar ecosystem, but the prices of the dollar and Treasuries do not move in lockstep. They therefore need to be monitored as separate indicators within the same system.

3. The Global Dollar Ecosystem Has Not Clearly Contracted

If the global dollar ecosystem were shrinking continuously, rapid growth in U.S. debt would clearly become more dangerous. At least from offshore dollar credit, however, there is no clear sign of contraction. BIS statistics show that by the end of 2025, dollar credit to non-bank borrowers outside the United States reached about $14.3 trillion, growing 8.5 percent in 2025, the fastest annual pace since 2014.[3] Of course, one indicator cannot represent the entire dollar ecosystem. It should be cross-checked against official reserves, payment and settlement shares, securities holdings, stablecoins, and cross-border financing.

Central-bank reserves are only one layer. Bank lending, dollar bonds, cross-border trade, securities investment, corporate finance, derivatives, and personal stores of value form other layers. A new gateway has now become increasingly important: dollar stablecoins.

The U.S. GENIUS Act requires payment stablecoins to be backed at least 1:1 by eligible reserves. Treasury securities used as reserves are generally limited to instruments with a remaining maturity of 93 days or less, and issuers may not pay interest or yield merely for holding a payment stablecoin.[4]

This means that today’s dollar stablecoins naturally increase demand first for dollars and short-term Treasuries. The U.S. Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee has likewise argued that continued stablecoin growth could create structural demand for short-term Treasuries.[5] Strengthening the dollar through stablecoins therefore does not automatically solve the financing problem for 10-, 20-, or 30-year Treasuries. Those maturities must be analyzed separately.

Stablecoins can of course evolve further. One possibility is a transparent stablecoin or transparent yield-bearing dollar asset in which the underlying long-term bonds, market value, maturity, interest income, and reserves are all transparent. Users would know exactly what they hold and what price risk they bear, allowing long-term bond yields to be combined with the circulation and verifiability of digital money. That is a separate subject and is not developed here.

4. Tokenization Changes the Radius of Demand and the Speed of Circulation

Tokenization does not create wealth out of thin air. But that does not mean it cannot create new effective demand.

Suppose an asset previously required a bank account, a brokerage account, restricted trading hours, a relatively high minimum transaction size, and complicated cross-border procedures. If tokenization allows users around the world to hold, transfer, and pledge that asset instantly, 24 hours a day, in small amounts, two important variables change: user reach and asset circulation speed. Potential demand from people who have money and want the asset but previously found it inconvenient to buy can become actual demand.

A U.S. Treasury TBAC study has also suggested that tokenization may expand Treasuries’ access to domestic and global pools of savings, generate incremental demand, and improve liquidity by reducing operational and settlement frictions.[5] Tokenization therefore should not be dismissed simply as “old assets in new packaging.”

What must actually be measured is the number of new users, the number of new offshore users, turnover velocity, collateral usage, and ultimately net new demand. Until continuous data series exist, tokenization is better treated as a forward-looking indicator, not as proof that Treasury debt capacity has already increased.

This is one of the new variables that traditional debt-cycle models find difficult to incorporate.

Tokenization is raising the circulation speed and reach of financial assets, while crypto and AI can be seen as two important engines of the new era.

AI mainly changes productivity. Crypto changes more of the relationships of production, asset relationships, and the organization of finance.

There is relatively little debate over whether AI can improve efficiency; the real question is by how much.

Crypto is different. Many people can see the broad direction, but once the discussion reaches the detailed design of money, banking, securities, regulation, and credit, the absence of a mature and unified theoretical yardstick creates hesitation—even among very intelligent people. For those who do not understand it, waiting and observing can be entirely rational. Crypto finance today is broadly at such a stage.

Another new variable that is easier to test continuously with real-world data is AI.

5. AI May Change the Speed of Capital Formation

Traditional debt-cycle analysis often treats economic growth as a relatively slow-moving variable.

AI may change not only the growth rate but the speed of the entire cycle from discovering an opportunity, to forming investment, to generating income, to creating new assets.

Stanford’s 2026 AI Index reports that global corporate AI-related investment reached $581.69 billion in 2025, up 129.9 percent year over year.[6]

SpaceX raised about $75 billion in its 2026 IPO, setting an IPO financing record.[7]

The $75 billion figure does not prove that the capital allocation was correct, nor can all of the money be counted as foreign capital. But it does show that when the United States produces an opportunity believed in by investors around the world, U.S. capital markets can concentrate a very large amount of savings in a short period of time.

IPO proceeds do not disappear in a day. The money enters corporate accounts and is gradually used to buy equipment, pay wages, build infrastructure, and invest in suppliers. Once spent, it becomes deposits and income for other firms and individuals.

At the same time, the modern banking system is not a fixed pool of money. Subject to capital, liquidity, and regulatory constraints, banks can expand their balance sheets and create new deposits through lending. AI investment therefore cannot be reduced to the mechanical statement: “AI took $100, so there is $100 less available to buy Treasuries.”

Two new indicators should be studied.

The first is an AI productivity-gain indicator: by how much does AI increase output per unit of time, improve product quality, reduce error rates, and expand the complexity of the problems one person can handle?

Simply counting hours saved is not enough. AI’s deeper effect may be that work that was previously uneconomic because of excessive knowledge breadth, time cost, or complexity now becomes economically feasible.

The second is an AI capital-formation-speed indicator: when a new opportunity appears, how quickly can it attract global capital into the United States and convert that capital— through IPOs, equity, corporate bonds, bank credit, and corporate reinvestment—into real productive capacity?

If this process ultimately produces simultaneous growth in U.S. corporate revenue, profits, productivity, real wages, the tax base, and global capital inflows, then AI is not merely an equity-market theme; it becomes a real variable that increases U.S. debt-carrying capacity.

If investment surges but income, productivity, and the tax base do not follow, the data will expose that as well. Whether AI ultimately raises Treasury debt capacity still depends on whether income, profits, productivity, and the tax base actually catch up.

6. Gold and Bitcoin Are Pressure Gauges on the Other Side

Global savings do not have only one destination in U.S. Treasuries.

When investors worry about sovereign currencies and sovereign debt, two assets without a sovereign debtor on the other side become relevant: gold and Bitcoin.

Gold is already providing a strong real-world signal. Global central banks bought about 1,136 tonnes of gold on a net basis in 2022, the highest level since 1950; in 2024 they bought about 1,045 tonnes, marking a third consecutive year above 1,000 tonnes.[8] Gold therefore has to be included in any serious analysis of Treasury demand.

Bitcoin has a much shorter history than gold and cannot yet be said to possess the same stable safe-haven characteristics. But it provides something the world did not previously have at scale: a scarce, non-sovereign digital asset.

Three groups of data can therefore be monitored simultaneously: market capitalization, net fund flows, and share of global store-of-value assets.

Market capitalization is not the same as dollar inflows, but it shows the direction of market repricing; net flows tell us where marginal capital is actually going. If gold and Bitcoin continue to rise as a share of global wealth while Treasury convenience yields continue to decline, that combination tells us much more than the slogan “de-dollarization.”

7. We Must Study How the U.S. Government Solves Problems

Government is not a passive accounting unit.

When a modern state faces a problem, it can respond through direct fiscal spending, taxation, tariffs, regulatory reform, financial innovation, private capital, burden-sharing with allies, or technology policy. Different governments can therefore face similar problems and end up creating very different amounts of additional public debt.

Government should not be judged only by what it says, but by what it actually does and by how the balance sheet ultimately changes. Stablecoin regulation, for example, is not the Treasury directly spending money to buy its own debt. It is the creation of a regulatory structure under which a private stablecoin market may generate new demand for short-term Treasuries.

In 2025, the United States also formally established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, stipulated that BTC placed in the reserve generally would not be sold, and authorized the Treasury and Commerce Departments to explore additional acquisition methods that do not impose incremental costs on taxpayers.[9] Whether these actions ultimately prove effective cannot be decided in advance. They suggest a possible indicator of “government problem-solving efficiency.”

One could compare different administrations by looking at incremental debt, fiscal deficits, inflation, interest costs, direct fiscal costs of resolving international disputes, the amount of private capital mobilized, additions to the tax base, and new dollar demand.

This need not be a partisan exercise. Compare outcomes, not parties. An activist government can also make mistakes, but government agency itself changes the future balance sheet and therefore cannot be removed from a debt model. Comparisons across administrations must also consider the scale and duration of the problems they faced and the eventual outcomes, rather than comparing only the absolute amount of new debt.

8. Who Gains Wealth from Treasury Issuance?

When the government issues debt, someone on the other side receives an asset. Morgan Stanley’s report already notes an important point: deterioration in the public-sector balance sheet can coexist with improvements in household and corporate income, liquidity, and investment capacity; in macro accounting, a balance-sheet change in one sector often corresponds to a change in another.

But one question remains: who ultimately received the new wealth?

“Private-sector wealth increased” is not the end of the analysis, because the private sector is not one person. If government debt grows, money and credit expand, and equity and real-estate prices then rise while those assets are disproportionately owned by wealthy households, the chain can become:

Government liabilities increase → private financial assets increase → asset prices rise → wealth becomes more concentrated.

This is why CPI alone is not enough. At a minimum we should track consumer prices, wages, equities, real estate, and wealth concentration.

If asset prices persistently outpace median real income while ownership of those assets remains highly concentrated, aggregate wealth can rise even as wealth inequality widens. This is part of the institutional pressure already visible in the United States.

Long-run Treasury sustainability therefore has at least three distinct dimensions: fiscal sustainability, financial-system sustainability, and distributional sustainability.

The third dimension eventually feeds back into the first two through elections, taxation, and public spending. Wealth concentration is therefore not a peripheral social issue; it is a slow-moving variable that can shape future fiscal policy and financing costs.

9. History Shows That Single Indicators Often Fail

In 2011, the U.S. sovereign credit rating was downgraded. Under a simple chain of “lower credit quality → Treasury selloff → higher yields,” the expected direction looked obvious. Yet the opposite occurred: on the first trading day after the downgrade, the 10-year Treasury yield fell by about 24 basis points while the S&P 500 dropped 6.8 percent.[10]

In 2013, the opposite pattern appeared. The U.S. fiscal position did not suddenly experience an equivalent credit shock, yet when markets began to expect that the Federal Reserve would taper asset purchases, the 10-year Treasury yield rose rapidly from about 1.63 percent in early May to about 2.74 percent in early July.[11] This shows that Treasury prices cannot be explained by the debt total alone.

Fiscal credibility, growth, inflation, the Fed, Treasury supply, dollar demand, global risk appetite, and market positioning can all matter at the same time. The objective is therefore not to discover a single universal indicator, but to identify multiple, reasonably independent indicators that can verify one another.

10. Building a Verifiable “Dollar World” Dashboard

If we merely say that “many factors must be considered,” we remain at the level of qualitative explanation. The next step is to turn the framework into numbers.

A first version of the dashboard can be organized as follows: System Question Core verifiable indicators U.S. fiscal position Can the government afford to pay? Net interest / federal revenue; primary deficit; average financing cost; maturity profile Treasury financing price How expensive must the next tranche be to sell? 10Y/30Y real yields; term premium; convenience yield; auction tail; dealer take-down Dollar ecosystem How much does the world still need dollars? Offshore dollar credit; global dollar financing; stablecoin scale; use of dollar assets Treasury demand Who is buying, and at what maturities? Foreign official/private net purchases; foreign holdings; bill/bond mix; repo usage Digital-finance expansion Does the new ecosystem create incremental demand? Tokenized Treasuries and equities; user counts; trading speed; on-chain collateral scale New productive capacity Is the U.S. creating wealth faster? AI investment; AI revenue/profits; productivity; IPOs; global capital inflows; tax base Alternative stores of value Is wealth shifting toward non-sovereign assets? Gold/BTC market value; net flows; share of global assets Society and government Can the domestic system remain sustainable? Real wages; asset prices; wealth concentration; fiscal cost of government problem-solving

At the first stage, there is no need to force weights onto the indicators or compress them into a single composite index. Short-run warnings should give priority to price and flow variables such as real rates, the term premium, auction tails, and net purchases. Long-run carrying capacity should rely more on stock and slow-moving variables such as the dollar ecosystem, productivity, the tax base, and wealth distribution.

The indicators should then be back tested against historical episodes such as 2011, 2013, 2020, 2022, and 2025, gradually calibrating thresholds and identifying which variables lead, coincide with, or lag stress. Thresholds should not be invented simply to make the framework look quantitative before back testing supports them.

Based on the facts already cited in this article, the current reading is not a simple red light or green light. The dollar ecosystem has not clearly contracted; the special convenience of medium- and long-term Treasuries has weakened; stablecoins mainly add demand for short-term Treasury instruments; tokenization and AI offer potential new demand and productive capacity; and gold and Bitcoin are becoming more important as alternative stores of value. The real warning would be these indicators beginning to converge in an adverse direction at the same time.

The dashboard still needs further refinement and historical testing.

This article crosses fiscal policy, money, banking, international capital, bonds, AI, and crypto. Both knowledge and data have limits. Where accurate verification is possible, use factual data. Where variables cannot yet be separated precisely, use historical experience and proxy indicators and state the assumptions explicitly.

As data accumulates, indicators with explanatory power should be recalibrated and consolidated; those without explanatory power should be discarded.

That is the discipline of a verifiable method: key facts should be verifiable, key processes should be replayable, and key judgments should provide reasons that can be reviewed.

11. Debt-to-GDP Alone Cannot Predict When the Dollar System Will Fail

Debt-to-GDP is not a meaningless indicator. It simply should not be asked to do more than it can.

The IMF’s 2026 forecast for general-government gross debt is approximately 204.4 percent of GDP for Japan, 125.8 percent for the United States, and 106.9 percent for China.[12]

The three countries have very different systems.

China uses capital-account management and absorbs a substantial share of debt pressure through its domestic financial system, interest-rate policy, and exchange-rate management. Japan has long relied on local-currency financing, the domestic financial system, and relatively low interest rates while allowing the exchange rate to absorb a significant share of adjustment. The United States has an additional layer: global demand for the dollar and Treasuries.

Japan provides at least one important counterexample: a very high government-debt-to-GDP ratio does not automatically imply that a country will suffer a debt collapse within a few years.

It is therefore insufficient to predict that the dollar will collapse within several years simply because U.S. debt-to-GDP reaches a particular number.

For countries without a global reserve-currency role, debt-to-GDP usually gives a more direct measure of the domestic economy’s capacity to carry government liabilities. For currencies such as the dollar and the euro, which are embedded in international reserves, funding, and settlement, using only domestic GDP as the denominator omits the global-demand layer.

Debt-to-GDP should therefore remain as an indicator of domestic U.S. fiscal pressure, but it should lose its status as the master indicator of the safety of the entire dollar system.

Two different questions must be measured: Can the U.S. fiscal system service its obligations? And can the global dollar ecosystem continue to absorb dollars and U.S. Treasuries? The point is not to replace debt-to-GDP with one new, larger denominator, but to use two rulers: one for fiscal servicing capacity and one for global market carrying capacity.

Looking further ahead raises a second question: what, if anything, could actually replace the dollar?

Gold can certainly function as a store of value and can also back gold tokens. But gold backing does not automatically create trust. If the public cannot continuously verify how much gold an issuer actually holds, where it is stored, and whether it has been pledged more than once, trust ultimately returns to the issuer. More importantly, a modern monetary ecosystem needs more than a store of value. It needs payments, settlement, credit creation, financing, collateral, asset pricing, and crisis-liquidity support. Gold can be an important reserve asset, but gold alone is insufficient to create a complete modern financial ecosystem.

Other countries can build their own fiat-currency systems for cross-border payment, clearing, and financing. But no other system currently matches the dollar ecosystem across pricing, settlement, capital markets, safe assets, collateral, and ultimate liquidity support.

Thus, even though U.S. fiscal problems are becoming increasingly visible, the dollar remains, for now, something like the relatively better apple in a basket of imperfect apples.

At this point it is essential to distinguish facts from the author’s long-term judgments.

The following discussion of the long-run evolution of fiat money, Bitcoin as a “public credit root” (a public root of trust), and the conversion of gold reserves is the author’s long-term judgment and is not part of the current-risk conclusion of the “Dollar World” dashboard.

The author’s long-term view is that continuous fiat credit expansion contains an internal contradiction that cannot persist forever. The dollar is the strongest fiat currency today, but that does not mean the fiat system can exist permanently.

The author discussed this issue specifically in “Predicting When the Dollar Will Collapse from the Natural Growth Curve,” emphasizing that any specific year is only a reference point; the real objective is to judge the long-term trend.[13]

Bitcoin therefore has a possibility that differs from gold. Gold is primarily a store of value without a sovereign debtor.

In the author’s view, Bitcoin may eventually perform not only a gold-like store-of-value role but also the role of a public credit root: if a growing number of assets, transactions, and credit facts ultimately rely on the Bitcoin system as a public verification base, Bitcoin’s value would arise not only from the scarcity of 21 million coins, but also from the degree to which society depends on the Bitcoin system itself. If that view is ultimately validated, Bitcoin’s functional ceiling would exceed golds.

The United States has already established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, which at minimum means Bitcoin has entered the national balance sheet.[9]

The author does not envision the dollar suddenly disappearing within a few years. The path could be gradual and take decades, perhaps around 50 years:

Dollar system → Bitcoin-enhanced dollar system → a broader decentralized digital-asset standard.

From this perspective, if Bitcoin’s value as a public credit root is eventually validated by the market, one aggressive national-balance-sheet strategy for the United States would be gradually and periodically converting part of its gold reserves into Bitcoin.

That remains a policy hypothesis that must be tested.

With these distinctions in place, the conclusion of this article is not that “Treasuries are safe” or that “Treasuries are dangerous.” It is to define in advance what facts would support each judgment and what facts would falsify it. Indicators can be added, merged, or eliminated, but the rules of judgment must remain open to historical and future verification.

The real question surrounding $40 trillion in U.S. Treasury debt is therefore not:

When will it collapse?

It is:

At what rates are U.S. fiscal capacity, the Treasury market, the global dollar ecosystem, technology-driven productivity and capital formation, and alternative credit assets such as gold and Bitcoin changing?

Once these indicators are built, we do not need to believe Morgan Stanley, any macro investment master, or even this article.

Let the facts move. Let time verify them.

References

[1] Wenxin Du, Ritt Keerati, and Jesse Schreger, “Decoupling Dollar and Treasury Privilege,” NBER Working Paper 35000, 2026. https://www.nber.org/papers/w35000

[2] Federal Reserve, “FIMA Repo Facility FAQs.” https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fima-repo-facility-faqs.htm

[3] Bank for International Settlements, international banking statistics and global liquidity indicators at end-December 2025. https://www.bis.org/statistics/rppb2604.htm

[4] 12 U.S.C. § 5903, Requirements for Issuing Payment Stablecoins. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/12/5903

[5] U.S. Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, Treasury issuance and secondary-market study, 2024. https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/221/TBACCharge2Q42024.pdf

[6] Stanford HAI, AI Index Report 2026. https://hai.stanford.edu/assets/files/ai_index_report_2026.pdf

[7] Reuters, “Musk’s SpaceX prices record $75 billion IPO at $135 a share,” June 11, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/musks-spacex-prices-record-75-billion-ipo-135-share-2026-06-11/

[8] World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends—Central Banks. https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/gold-demand-trends/gold-demand-trends-full-year-2022/central-banks

[9] The White House, Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile, 2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-establishes-the-strategic-bitcoin-reserve-and-u-s-digital-asset-stockpile/

[10] U.S. Treasury, 2012 Annual Report, Box A: Impacts of Downgrade of U.S. Treasury Securities. https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/261/2012-Annual-Report.pdf

[11] Federal Reserve, FEDS Notes, dealer balance-sheet capacity and the 2013 fixed-income selloff. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/notes/feds-notes/2013/dealer-balance-sheet-capacity-and-market-liquidity-during-the-2013-selloff-in-fixed-income-markets-20131016.html

[12] IMF DataMapper, General Government Gross Debt (2026 forecast). https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/profile/JPN

[13] Weisha Zhu, “Predicting When the Dollar Will Collapse from the Natural Growth Curve,” chainless.hk, December 11, 2024. https://chainless.hk/2024/12/11/predicting-when-the-dollar-will-collapse-from-the-natural-growth-curve/