This Would Not Be Good

If we have a treasury auction and no one showed up?

You can see it happening if the interest rates went low enough - what's the point of buying a 30 year bill at less than 2%?  Especially if you know inflation will go up faster than that.  Our economy is terribly unhealthy right now - the interest rates are way too low.  I think we can survive 8%, even 10% unemployment.  It is bad, but survivable.  It would impact a single generation - mostly the young people - and it would disproportionally hurt the least well educated and lower middle class.  But we can't survive all senior citizens losing 50% of their savings if something catastrophic happened to the banking system.  Who will pay for all of it?  We'd need to do a wealth tax at some point.  Or something.