Governments face a trade-off between insuring bondholders and taxpayers. If the government fully insures bondholders by manufacturing risk-free zero-beta debt, then it cannot also insure taxpayers against permanent macroeconomic shocks over long horizons. Instead, taxpayers will pay more in...

Short-term Treasury debt has high Sharpe ratios and, according to the Hansen-Jagannathan bound, implies a very volatile bond market SDF. In this paper, we show that a small convenience yield on the risk-free asset can rationalize this pattern without requiring a volatile SDF. We further show...