Rob Taylor
Red Alerts: The American Survival Blog
2/2/2011
Hyperinflation here we come:
The Federal Reserve has surpassed China as the leading holder of US Treasury securities even though it has yet to reach the halfway mark in its latest round of quantitative easing, according to official figures.
Based on weekly data released on Thursday, the New York Fed’s holdings of Treasuries in its System Open Market Account, known as Soma, total $1,108bn, made up of bills, notes, bonds and Treasury Inflation Protected Securities, or Tips
According to the most recent US Treasury data on foreign holders of US government paper, China holds $896bn and Japan owns $877bn.
“By June [the Fed] will have accumulated some $1,600bn of Treasury securities, likely to be in the vicinity of China and Japan’s combined holdings,” said Richard Gilhooly, a strategist at TD Securities. “The New York Fed surpassed China in the past month as the largest holder of US Treasury securities,” he noted.
The Fed is buying Treasury debt under two programmes. The largest is QE2, which began in November and is scheduled to involve $600bn of purchases by June.
It is also buying $30bn of Treasuries a month as it reinvests principal payments from its large holdings of mortgage debt and debt issued by government housing agencies – a programme dubbed QE lite.
Clearly two things are going on. The first is that the Fed is desperate to keep up the illusion of a recovery and is willing to destroy our currency to do it. The second is more important. China is not buying enough of our debt to keep us running. Think about that for a second.
What happens when they stop buying debt all together?
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