Anyone looking at the Federal Reserve’s own data set, that provided with the generous “free” funding of the US taxpayer by way of the St. Louis Fed’s FRED database, will notice something quite welcome, if magical: total US debt held by the public – that which is not part of intragovernment holdings, read Social Security – has mysteriously collapsed from $12 trillion to $5 trillion. Somehow, with nobody looking, the Fed managed to reduce US total debt by $7 trillion.