The Treasury said it will offer a quarterly refunding package of $125 billion to refund $116.4 billion in maturing securities and to raise $8.6 billion in new cash from private investors. The refunding package size is unchanged from the last refunding announced July 31.

The refunding package consists of $58 billion in 3-year notes, $42 billion in 10-year notes, and $25 billion in 30-year bonds, all unchanged from the previous refunding offering. The rest of Treasury's funding needs will be met with the weekly T-bill auctions, cash management bills (CMBs), the monthly note, bond, Treasury Inflation-Protected securities (TIPS) auctions, and 2-year Floating Rate Note (FRN) auctions.

Regarding the buyback program, the Treasury left its plans unchanged by saying it would conduct weekly buybacks of up to $4 billion per operation in Treasury coupon securities. In longer maturities, Treasury plans two operations, each up to $2 billion, over the quarter. Treasury also plans two operations, each up to $500 million, in each of the TIPS buckets.

Interestingly, Treasury officials told reporters they do not expect to change the size of nominal debt offerings over the next several quarters. Officials said T-bill offerings would tick up in January, depending on financing needs, but declined to say by how much.

The Treasury announcement said Treasury expects to maintain current size of T-bill offerings through November and may issue one or two cash management bills, as needed. Then it expects modest reductions in T-bill offering sizes during December.

Each quarter the U.S. Treasury announces its funding needs for the next two quarters. The announcement includes which securities will be offered and the dates of their announcement, auction and settlement.

Bond market players pay attention to this release so that they know the degree of looming supply of Treasuries coming onto the market so that they can evaluate what appropriate yields might be for trading. Heavy supply coming onto the market suggests higher yields.