On August 19, 2026, the U.S. Treasury announced that it would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations in the 10-to-20-year and 20-to-30-year maturity sectors.

The current maximum of $2 billion per operation will rise to at least $4 billion, effective September 9 through November 4, 2026, the end of the quarterly refunding period. The following day, Scott Bessent added that the figure could exceed $4 billion per issue and that the Treasury would “make a market” in those maturities, according to the Treasury.

It is worth putting the scale in context before talking about monetization. In its August 5 quarterly refunding announcement, the Treasury had already planned to buy back up to $38 billion in off-the-run securities for liquidity support and up to $25 billion in the one-month-to-two-year sector for cash-management purposes during the quarter, according to Treasury Department data. The August expansion adds at least another $14 billion, raising the maximum buybacks for the August 6–November 5 period from $69 billion to $83 billion, according to Reuters.

The US $40 trillion debt has dominated global headlines. However, although the US fiscal challenges are relevant, we must remember an important lesson. Fiscal policy is not about who wins but who loses first.

According to official 2026 estimates, the present value of U.S. Social Security and Medicare financing gaps is about $95 trillion over 75 years, roughly 5% of the cumulative present value of projected GDP over that period, on top of federal debt held by the public, which is already projected at 101% of annual GDP in 2026.

However, the euro area’s hidden fiscal burden is at least as large as its recorded debt. Official European Commission estimates put net accrued public-pension liabilities at around 150% of GDP, after future contributions are considered, while gross pension promises amount to roughly 371% of GDP. Importantly, this excludes much of the future pressure from health and long-term care spending.

Americans are falling into the socialism trap by not realizing that solving big government problems with an even bigger one is dangerous. Many blame capitalism for their affordability problems, when the true cause is statism. Statism is the gradual replacement of civil society, markets, savings, and individual choice by political control, public spending, regulation, taxation, and monetary intervention.

The predatory state that I discuss in my book The New Global Economic Order represents the extreme manifestation of statism. It is a system where the political class extracts wealth and freedom from families and businesses to sustain itself, reward dependent clients, and exert control over society.

Big government, high taxes, constant money printing, and cronyism are not free market capitalism.

The Federal Reserve’s legal mandate is clear. It must focus on stable prices and maximum employment. In the past five years, the Fed has failed on both. Inflation remains materially above the 2 percent target, reaching a decade-high 25% cumulative inflation in the 2021-2025 period, while restrictive monetary conditions have been limited to rate hikes, which weigh most heavily on the small and medium-sized firms that generate most of net employment growth.

This failure was not merely a matter of missing a forecast but a policy framework that became narrative-driven rather than data-dependent. The Fed spent much of 2025 moving between concerns about inflation from tariffs based on ideology and a growing admission of weakness in the labor market. However, it continued to treat interest rates as its overwhelmingly dominant instrument. That is a poor policy mix when the problem of persistent inflation was caused by excessive government spending. Kritzman, at MIT Sloan, concluded that “mathematically, the overwhelming driver of that burst of inflation in 2022 was federal spending, not the supply chain.” However, the Fed’s policy was directed at penalizing the private sector while incentivizing large government deficit spending.