US Treasury Secretary & other Government Departments have started talking about buying back US Treasuries and there has been speculation that is is in some form, Quantitative Easing.
The fragile nature of the UST market is currently that market markers don’t want to buy off-the-run USTs because they can’t use them as repo collateral in a market where selling is rife.
So the buy-backs simply remove the off-the-run USTs from the market and replace them with short term bills, which are the market’s most liquid repo collateral.
Blimey - finally a good idea.