00:00Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Secretary, how's the jet lag?
00:05Been better.
00:07Yeah, it's impressive, but I don't know if you get frequent flyer miles for all this traveling.
00:14No, but I take my responsibilities of reporting to Congress very seriously.
00:19No, we appreciate you making the effort to get here.
00:22I'm going to give you something that's a little bit different, but it's more some of the things we specialize with the Joint Economic Committee and those.
00:29We'd like to actually engage, this is probably more technical staff, on what we can do to actually, there's things we can do policy-wise, message-wise, product-wise,
00:47in regards to moving away from notes and bills and being able to create some additional interest liquidity on the bonds, moving out in the curve.
00:58With past Treasury secretaries, we've done presentations on everything from Professor Shuler's Trill's idea, where it's a bond but it actually has a slight attachment to, as an equity interest in the U.S., tax receipts,
01:16and therefore it's sympathetic with tax revenues, to things you've actually written about or your team around you have written about, certain gold indexes and other things for long-term debt.
01:30My interest is very much, and this is an intellectual conflict many of us in Congress have, the substantial portion of growth of debt is demographics.
01:42We don't like to tell people the truth, but we have a dramatic shortage of young people in the country. Today, compared to 20 years ago, we have double the number of people, 65, but our 18-year-olds are exactly the same as 20 years ago.
01:56It's demographics, and we're going to try to make demographics partisan because that's what we do. How does someone like me work with your team to actually give you product ideas, messaging to the markets and liquidity that going along on the curve is stable, and we're going to be there to protect our full faith and credit?
02:24Congressman, you raise a very important issue, and what you're talking about is something called the dependency ratio.
02:34The U.S. is the only major industrialized economy where that ratio is roughly stable. It is in slight decline.
02:47Many other economies, Italy, Japan in particular, are seeing the dependency ratio blow out, and hence their productive capability.
03:01We would welcome the opportunity to engage with you and your staff on any ideas that you may have.
03:08Right now, we are committed to the fulsome, the regular cadence of Treasury issuance as it is.
03:19I would add that in my lifetime, and I can't believe, to go back to experts, we always see it's this industrial revolution, it's that industrial revolution.
03:33I'm not sure whether we're on the fourth or fifth, but I do believe that we are on an industrial revolution, an AI revolution that may lead to a productivity breakthrough that could be very important.
03:48Mr. Secretary, you're stealing one of my speeches, but synthetic biology, AI, automation, and that's actually a side conversation on reindustrialization and the actual statistical information of how much of that's going to be labor-substituted by automation, and therefore we may not get the same wage growth in the academic literature.
04:10But that's going to be geeking out a little bit.
04:15My great interest is, I don't believe many of us on this committee have spent enough time, whether it be a Democrat in the White House, a Republican, on debt management, and the fact we on this committee have the responsibility to work with you in Treasury to have as much stability in that model.
04:37Because today we borrow, what, about $72,000 a second, you know, outside the math for extraordinary measures.
04:44I haven't done it by second, but I think on a daily basis.
04:48But, Congressman, I can tell you, the thing that would give us the greatest debt stability is increasing the debt ceiling.
04:57Because that is a cataclysmic outcome that we will never allow to happen.
05:04Mr. Secretary, I absolutely agree. Visibility, capacity is important.
05:09But even your own numbers, in nine years, we borrow about $100,000 a second, almost solely driven by demographics, healthcare, Medicare, and interest.
05:20I beg of you, it's hard to do in front of these microphones because it's uncomfortable to talk about, but it's math.
05:28And it's the reality of what we are as people.
05:31We need to work together to provide visibility to these debt markets.
