Uncle Sam Wants You. . .to Buy Treasury Bonds

The U.S. Treasury has an unenviable job: It has to find buyers for trillions of dollars in new bonds that are sold to fund each year's federal deficit and replace maturing bonds. It hopes average citizens will pony up and invest hundreds of billions of dollars in newly issued bonds, but that might not be a winning investment for you. With deficits climbing from $455 billion in 2008 to $1.42 trillion in 2009, $1.3 trillion in 2010 and an estimated $1.5 trillion in 2011, the Treasury's task has become even more challenging. For context, the current debt owed to "the...