The way the US government raises money is by selling treasuries with interest. Give me $100 now and I'll give you $105 in a year type stuff. Those rates are determined by market mechanics. If you set the rates to $0, nobody would buy them, and the government would be unable to raise money. The Fed rate is something else, the rate banks pay to each other for [generally] brief lending.
As for Japan, I find their name pops up oddly frequently in economic discussions. I suspect many of us still have an image of them from a time when we were growing up and their economy was booming - predicted by some to imminently surpass even the US. Here [1] is a graph of its GDP including and since then. They been in a state somewhere between decay and stagnation for nearly 3 decades now.
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The way the US government raises money is by selling treasuries with interest. Give me $100 now and I'll give you $105 in a year type stuff. Those rates are determined by market mechanics. If you set the rates to $0, nobody would buy them, and the government would be unable to raise money. The Fed rate is something else, the rate banks pay to each other for [generally] brief lending.
As for Japan, I find their name pops up oddly frequently in economic discussions. I suspect many of us still have an image of them from a time when we were growing up and their economy was booming - predicted by some to imminently surpass even the US. Here [1] is a graph of its GDP including and since then. They been in a state somewhere between decay and stagnation for nearly 3 decades now.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/263578/gross-domestic-pr...
The US government has no need to sell Treasuries at all. It already has the best bond in the world. The US dollar.
Lots of people want that. Particularly those with tax bills to pay in dollars.
Why repeat the myth?