Risky Treasury sale building behind debt ceiling dam.

Ian Nunn writes, There is a risk that rates will blow out or an auction will fail. The Fed may be forced to step in with a one time QE to soak up excess supply.   The Fed, to achieve its low employment and stable price mandate, set up QE2 to stimulate the economy by driving interest rates down.  It did this by buying large quantities of Treasury bills and notes. With QE2 ending, it has about $32 billion/month coming in from principal repayment from mortgage backed securities from QE1 which it feels will be enough to maintain low rates.

Zero Hedge, however, notices a problem developing with this approach:

From Zero Hedge
"The ongoing contraction in debt issuance is only temporary... When and if the debt ceiling is lifted, the Treasury will not only have to issue as much debt as before, but it will have to issue massively more in the short term to catch up ....  Geithner will suddenly find himself needing to plug a gap of over 2 months worth of accrued treasury issuance.Mathematically, this means the Treasury will have to sell not the $100 billion or so in net debt but well over double that in August and September. And this will happen at a time when there is no QE2 to soak up the excess slack." 


Update:  $500 billion debt bomb to be rolled over in August claims Durden at Zero Hedge July 1st.