According to the Peterson Foundation, US government debt is on a path to reach 50 trillion dollars within the next six years.

Despite promising to reduce government spending in all three of his presidential campaigns, President Trump, with the assistance of congressional Republicans and Democrats, has continued to grow the government debt.

Concerns over all but a handful of politicians in Washington, DC supporting adding to the government's debt, along with worries over the effects of the ongoing Iran war, caused the interest rate on long term Treasury bonds (referred to as the yield) to increase. They reached their highest level since June of 2007 — a little over a year before the beginning of the great recession.

Following the yield increase, the Treasury Department announced on Wednesday that it would start purchasing at least twice the amount of long-term bonds that it had previously planned to purchase, reducing the supply of long-term bonds in an effort to reduce the yield. The Treasury's intervention initially lowered yields. However, the next day the yield on Treasury bonds rose again.