China has quietly halved its holdings of Treasuries since 2013

 


As long as the US runs a trade deficit and sends dollars overseas, foreign countries must find a home for those dollar revenues, with Treasuries remaining one of the main destinations, said Jim O’Neill, the former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management.

What’s more, the actual decline in China’s holdings may be smaller than official figures suggest.

Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, estimates that China’s “true” holdings of US Treasuries exceed $1 trillion, far above the $683 billion reported by the US Treasury.

That’s because Beijing may have obscured its footprint by shifting assets to custodians in Europe. Belgium — whose holdings are considered to include some of those Chinese accounts — has seen its Treasury ownership quadruple since the end of 2017 to $481 billion.



11 februari 2026, 08:56


Kommentarer

Skicka en kommentar

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Pfizer in 2019 sold $20 billion of drugs in the U.S. Its federal tax bill? Zero; Ireland

Trump has already singled out pharma companies and countries like Ireland that reap the benefits of tax-avoidance moves.  Despite its small size, Ireland ran an $87 billion trade surplus with the U.S. last year—larger than any country except China, Mexico and Vietnam. https://www.wsj.com/health/pharma/how-trumps-tariffs-could-upend-pharmas-overseas-tax-strategy-5b8ca758 Is Ireland vulnerable again as the world’s vast shadow banking system starts to crack? Shadow banking is the dog that has not barked during the latest global spasm of financial stress. This is very fortunate, especially for small countries such as Ireland that have bet the farm on this industry. https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2023/04/is-ireland-vulnerable-again-as-worlds.html Cayman Islands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayman_Islands What the heck is happening in the Cayman Islands? A Sunny Place for a Shady Online Business https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-sunny-place-for-shady-online-business.html Ti...
Läs mer

My blogg short index

Bild
1968 Vojne, vojne, vänsterdårarna kommer AI Artificial intelligence https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/06/ai-artificial-intelligence.html Akvedukten vid Zaghouan, Sven Otto Littorin och Niall Ferguson. Denna vackra betraktelse från 1994 har sedan dess legat i mitt bakhuvud. https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/04/akvedukten-vid-zaghouan-sven-otto.html Alistair Darling, Northern Rock och Royal Bank of Scotland https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/07/alistair-darling.html Bank stress tests https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/06/bank-stress-tests.html Bessent https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/06/bessent.html Gordon Brown https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/07/gordon-brown_5.html Buy the dip https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/07/buy-dip.html Fastighetsbolagen https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/07/fastighetsbolagen.html Tomas Fischer https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/07/tomas-fischer.html James Grant https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/07/james-grant.h...
Läs mer

Cognitive blind spots

Bild
Cognitive blind spots are undermining our ability to see the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be. At the start of the 21st century, western elites generally assumed that globalisation, democracy and the free market were self-evidently good, and would keep spreading, creating peace. N o longer.  FIS, Swiss Federal Intelligence Service, has published a manual about cognitive blind spots. 18 different cognitive biases that hamper our thinking, such as “group think” (adhering to the cosy assumptions of our tribe), “anchoring” (relying exclusively on whatever information we see first, say on social media),  “confirmation bias” (only seeing data that reinforces pre-existing views),  “mirror imaging” (assuming others think like us),  “absence of evidence” bias (failing to think about the data we lack)  and “survivorship bias” (judging data only with success stories, not failures). Gillian Tett Financial Times 2 January 2026 https://www.ft.com/content/...
Läs mer