“It was a bunch of libraries in New York,” Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin said yesterday. This announcement ended two weeks of frenzied speculation in Washington as economists and pundits struggled to determine the reason why the National Debt was effectively doubled by a sudden jump of $22 trillion on March 14. Mnuchin explained that a consortium of libraries in suburban New York recently implemented a new software system. Glitches in the software governing overdue fines led to the sudden surge.
The Secretary brushed aside questions about how a consortium of 38 libraries could somehow cause trillions of dollars to be siphoned off from Federal coffers. “How is not important. The next step is to determine where the money went,” Mnuchin said.