After a summer of reorganizing national debt, the Treasury borrowed more than $100 billion a week in October
The strictly nonpartisan CBO reported that in October 2026, it estimated the federal government incurred a deficit of $409 billion—more than $100 billion a week.
Key points
- This is $125 billion more than the shortfall recorded last October.
- The fiscal path While this has made government borrowing relatively cheaper in the long term (interest rates are tied to long-dated Treasury yields), it will do little to reassure debt hawks the U.S.
- Treasury, with fiscal hawks questioning whether Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was moving deckchairs on the Titanic, rather than meaningfully improving the macroeconomic picture.
The strategy has not been confirmed verbatim by the Treasury, but Bessent himself has indicated the scheme worked by buying back more expensive, long-term debt (in which yields, and hence interest, are higher) in lieu of cheaper, short-term debt.
Additional details
- The report suggested October’s federal deficit was that much higher due to shifts in the timing of certain federal payments that otherwise would have been made on November 1 (that date fell on a weekend in 2025 and 2026, therefore pushing those payments into October of each year).
- It can work for a while, but eventually the mismatch starts to become more obvious.” Context has since achieved the desired effect: A range of factors (including tough Fed talk on inflation and the recent AI rout) have brought down longer-dated yields and smoothed volatility.
- This percentage is greater than the 50-year average of 3.8%, and has only previously been matched or exceeded eight times since 1946: from 2009 through 2012 and in 2020, 2021, 2023, and 2024.
- Revenues were $36 billion lower, and outlays were $89 billion higher than the same month last year, according to the CBO.
- Government income was up for the year to $5.4 trillion, up $169 billion in the 2025 fiscal year, thanks, in large part, to increases in collections of individual income and payroll taxes.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
Advertisement
Every article behind this summary — 1 article from 1 outlet
Get stories like this in your inbox.
Subscribe — it's freeOne free email at 6am — your topics, deduplicated, five minutes. No account, no paywall.