Adjustment of Public Debt Transactions to Cash Basis (Table III-B)

Table III-B answers a subtle but important question: how much cash did the Treasury actually raise or pay out through its debt operations? The gross issuance and redemption totals in Public Debt Transactions (Table III-A) include items that never touch the government’s bank account — securities sold at a discount or premium to face value, interest that accrues onto savings bonds and Government Account Series securities instead of being paid out, inflation adjustments on TIPS principal, and trust-fund rollovers that are purely bookkeeping entries.

This table strips those noncash items out, converting the gross figures to a cash basis. The results — public debt cash issues and public debt cash redemptions — are the amounts that actually flow into and out of the Treasury General Account (Table I), and they appear as deposit and withdrawal lines in Table II. It is the most technical table in the Daily Treasury Statement, and the reason headline “debt issued” numbers rarely match the cash the government banked.