Treasury mulls investing cash in repo. Experts aren’t convinced.

Putting idle cash to work would earn paltry returns and perhaps depress private lending activity, say sceptics

When the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee sat down for its second-quarter meeting on May 5, there was a new item on the agenda: a proposal, floated by the Treasury Department itself, for the US government to start lending its spare cash into the overnight repo market.

The pitch was straightforward: the Treasury General Account often holds hundreds of billions of dollars more than it needs for