No, the government buying its own debt is a very famous accounting trick designed to create more money in the economy. This act is the basis of the fractional reserve system, which in turn is the basis of all modern money.
The Federal Reserve bank buys bonds from bondholders (either newly issued bonds from the government or bonds from my safe deposit box). And in return it puts money in a bank account. Where does the money come from? It is just numbers in a database. The Fed just edits the database. Only the central government, which controls the currency, has the power to create money out of thin air in this way, but that power is very important.
(In other times, when the economy is really hot and inflation is soaring and we need to cool down, the Fed does the opposite: It raises interest rates, which causes people to want to buy bonds to get more interest, which causes people to spend their cash for those bonds. And, as each bond is bought, the Fed just erases the cash from bank accounts. The money vanishes! Remember, money is just a score in a game, the game of "keeping the economy working so that people can eat". It's not made of metal or anything. That was the old way, the way that didn't work.)
You can't get the same effect by selling bonds to England, because then England will pay for the bonds in dollars, and England can't create dollars. They have to buy dollars with pounds. So the total supply of dollars in the world would remain constant, which is not the point of this exercise.
(Now if I really understood econ we could go on to talk about why this little exercise might not work this time, about the "liquidity trap" and the "zero lower bound". But my time is up.)
This could also reflect a lack of faith in other governments rather than faith in the US government. If assorted European debt became 10x more risky but US debt only became 5x more risky, that would cause a flight into US debt.
One of the more interesting reactions to the FOMC’s gloomy appraisal of the economic state of affairs is the surge of strength into the dollar and the corresponding tumble in the euro. The U.S. dollar index — which is heavily weighted to the euro — is up 1.8%. The euro is down against the buck to the tune of 2.1%, a giant move in the forex markets.
http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2010/08/11/oh-man-not-europe...
Said the captain of the titanic.
It would actually be a good sign at this point if investors lost interest in buying government debt (from the US or from other governments). Because then they would find something else to invest in... like maybe something that promised some gain, something that would put people to work and make use of idle capacity. The fact that everyone is anxious to hoard cash or cash equivalents, even at miserable interest rates, is an ominous sign: When deflation comes, hoarding cash for as long as you can is a paying proposition, and the economy spirals to a halt as everyone tries to wait through as much deflation as possible before buying anything.
Interest rates reflect relative opportunities, not absolute value.
The fact that the US is seen as a better investment than, say, China, does not tell you that the US is a good investment.
> "zero lower bound".
0 is not a lower bound for interest rates. You can loan someone $100 today in return for $90 in ten years.
If you're trying to get folks to do something with the money that they borrowed, there are other levers. Or, you could just loan it to different people.
Or, equivalently, they can print $10 bills and hand them out to people. Simpler that way.
In practice, of course, it is preferable to give people jobs to do in exchange for their $10 bills, like fixing our broken roads or sewers, or building nice public infrastructure. That way we keep our workers and factories in practice, and we don't waste productive capacity, and we distribute the money according to fair rules, and we get some nicely paved streets.
But when you have to stimulate the economy and you're desperate you could literally "fire up the helicopter" (as the metaphor goes) and start dropping dollar bills from the sky.
Unfortunately, the Federal Reserve may not be able to do this. Deficit spending takes an act of Congress, and for various terrifying structural and political reasons the US Congress has punted on the problem of managing the economy.
see: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/11/why-we-need-an-i...
By the way, this is not just my opinion. Conservative economist Tyler Cowen (who teaches at GMU) also thinks that a little inflation would be helpful: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/business/economy/02view.ht...
If you want to claim that the CPI numbers are full of lies (because of a conspiracy?) then you need to bring serious evidence.
You need to pay more attention then, it's been nick-named the 'Grocery Shrink Ray' and practically all companies are doing it now. The strategy is basically either change the shape of the container (smaller) and keep the same price or to raise the price. Here is a good link to follow;
http://consumerist.com/tag/grocery-shrink-ray/
Oh, and my favorite one yet, "Now with 25% more!" while not actually offering any more.