The numbers are not in dispute. Foreign nationals studying in the UK borrowed more than £4 billion in taxpayer-funded student loans in 2024–25 — up from £3.2 billion in 2021–22. Suella Braverman and Reform UK are now making it a central political issue, framing it as universities exploiting an immigration-adjacent subsidy at the British public’s expense. Too many universities are selling immigration, not education. Last year, about 250,000 foreign students took up taxpayer-funded student loans to pay for their courses in the UK, worth £4bn.

For decades, U.S. Treasury securities commanded a pricing premium that economists call the convenience yield — the extra return investors were willing to forgo in exchange for holding the world’s most liquid, safest, most universally accepted collateral. That premium is eroding. The GAO’s March 2026 federal debt management report (GAO-26-107529) treats this as a structural shift, not a market fluctuation, and the data support that reading. The convenience yield is not directly observable.

The debt limit is, in strict operational terms, a fiction. Congress authorizes spending through the appropriations process. It authorizes revenue through the tax code. The debt that results from the gap between those two is mathematically determined. The debt limit then arrives as a third act — a separate legislative mechanism that can block Treasury from issuing the securities needed to pay obligations Congress has already created. It does not constrain spending.