The magnitude of federal financial operations in the management of the public debt has made them a new but highly essential topic for consideration in appraising the principal factors affecting the institutional investor. As the interest-bearing debt of the United States Government reached 276 billion dollars at the end of I945 compared with less than 48 billion dollars, at the end of I939, debt management ceased to be largely an absorbing study for the money market technician. The size, composition, and distribution of this huge increase in the debt introduced to institutional investors a number of policy and operational questions for which only tentative answers have been found thus far. I