What is the current National Debt of the United States of America?

By Quinton | March 10th, 2008

I decided to ask the Federal Reserve the current status of the national debt:
"I have recently heard many different figures in regards to the current national debt. Some sources point to $7 trillion, while others point to $80+ trillion. This is a huge discrepancy and I was hoping to get this question cleared up by the actual source. Thank you, Quinton"

The response:

Dear Mr. Figueroa:

Thank you for your recent correspondence concerning the current national account deficit. This information is
available on the website of U.S. Treasury Department's Bureau of the Public Debt. Here is the link:
http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opd.htm.

For your information, all the data that the Board publishes are available at www.federalreserve.gov. Specifically, economic data are available under the heading "Economic Research and Data;" banking data, under the headings "Banking Information and Regulation" and "Community Development;" and consumer data, in our G.19 Release, "Consumer Credit" (under "Economic Research and Data") and in our "Survey of Consumer Finances." In particular, I want to turn your attention to the Board's Data Download application, which provides interactive access to Federal Reserve statistical data in a variety of electronic formats.

Data Download is the first application to allow custom data packages to be created in SDMX-ML, a technical statistical data standard that is gaining support among central banks and statistical agencies. Data from the following four releases are now available: Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization (G.17), Flow of Funds Accounts of the United States (Z.1), Commercial Paper, and Selected Interest Rates (H.15). More releases will be added in the future. The application delivers customized data sets in machine-readable electronic formats (Excel, CSV, XML) or allows for quick downloading of formatted data packages. The SDMX-ML technical standard was developed by the Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange (SDMX) initiative under the governance of the Bank for International Settlements, the European Central Bank, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Eurostat, the United Nations, and the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development. The URL to Data Download is federalreserve.gov/datadownload.

I hope this information is helpful.

Sincerely,

JPD
Board Staff