Terence P. Jeffrey
CNSNews.com
6/8/2011
In the period since the Federal Reserve announced in November that it intended to buy $600 billion in U.S. government debt by the end of this June, the Fed has surpassed mainland China as the top owner of publicly traded U.S. Treasury securities.
As of the end of March, according to data released by the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury, the Fed owned $1.333 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities and the Chinese owned $1.1449 trillion. U.S. Treasury securities are the bills, notes and bonds sold by the Treasury Department to finance the debt of the U.S. government.
The $2.4779 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities owned by the Federal Reserve and the Chinese combined as of the end of March equaled 25.7 percent of the publicly-traded portion of the federal government’s debt (which stood at $9.6516 trillion at that point).
The full U.S. national debt–which includes both the publicly traded debt and non-publicly traded “intra-governmental” debt that the U.S. Treasury owes to government trust funds such as the Social Security trust funds–stood at $14.270 trillion at the end of March and at $14.3447 trillion as of the close of business this Monday.
On top of the $1.1449 trillion in U.S. debt that China owned at the end of March, other foreign interests owned an additional $3.3343 trillion, according to the Treasury Department.
The combined U.S. debt holdings of the Chinese and other foreign interests plus the U.S. debt holdings of the Federal Reserve equaled $5.8122 trillion at the end of March—or 60.2 percent of America’s $9.6516 trillion in publicly traded debt at that point…
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