Reserve Assets

The U.S. Treasury's decision in August to increase purchases of long-dated government bonds was small in dollar terms. The policy implications are harder to dismiss. Treasury is becoming more active at the long end of the government bond market just as another major policy shift is creating a potentially large and structurally different class of buyers at the opposite end of the curve: regulated stablecoin issuers. This is not yield curve control, and there is no evidence of coordination. But the structure of U.S. public debt increasingly matters for stablecoins, and the structure of stablecoins may increasingly matter for U.S. public debt.