>There would be no real advantage to this short term debt at %0, even if you're panicking, There is an advantage to 0% short term debt vs cash. If you have a l

>There would be no real advantage to this short term debt at %0, even if you're panicking, There is an advantage to 0% short term debt vs cash. If you have a lot of park somewhere you can't simply put it in a savings account. FDIC protection only goes so far if your bank of choice goes belly up. So what are your choices? Well you can buy commercial paper for a while but after certain amounts that market dries up too (because there simply isn't enough of high quality commercial issuers). Treasuries are available in gargantuan quantities, are highly liquid, and assumed to be risk free. >What this does indicate is that the fed is buying treasuries directly to keep interest rates low. That's not really true these days. There was some of this going on up to the last round of quantitative easing but since then the levels held really steady: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TREAST https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TREAST The fed really isn't a big player on UST auctions these days.