A quick chart showing how my estimates (from work I have done with Arpana Pandey of the CFR) for official holdings of Treasuries and Agencies compares with the FRBNY custodial holdings and the data that the US reports on the TIC website.My estimates match those of the TIC in June of every year —...
Read more »
One of the biggest economic and political stories of this decade has been China’s emergence as the world’s biggest creditor country. At least in a ‘flow” sense. China’s current account surplus is now the world’s largest – and its government easily tops a “reserve and sovereign wealth fund” growth...
Read more »
The Fed’s custodial holdings of Treasuries just topped $2 trillion. Custodial holdings of Treasuries rose by $25 billion in July. The overall pace of growth in the Fed’s custodial holdings did slow a bit in July, as some of the rise in Treasuries was offset by a fall in Agency...
Read more »
It is now rather common to argue that those economists who anticipated the crisis anticipated the wrong crisis – a dollar crisis, not a banking crisis. Robin Harding of the FT writes:
“If economists try to predict crises they will get it wrong, and that will reduce their credibility when they...
Read more »
There is a common argument that the US depends more on China now than before because the US needs to issue so many Treasury bonds to finance its fiscal deficit.
I disagree, for two reasons:
First, the trade deficit is down significantly, so the amount that the US needs to borrow from the rest of the...
Read more »
Is now rather obvious. The dollar goes down as well as up.
Last fall, demand for dollars rose — in part because Americans pulled funds out of the rest of the world faster than foreigners pulled funds out of the US. The dollar soared....
Read more »
The goods news: the US trade deficit has shrunk. On a rolling 12m basis the trade deficit is down to around $500 billion, and the data from the last few months suggests that it should fall even further.
The bad news: the US trade deficit hasn’t shrunk by as much as foreign...
Read more »
Most reporting on the May trade data tried to fit it into the “green shoots” meta-narrative, thanks to the small uptick in exports. Never mind that total exports were about equal to their level in March even after the May uptick– and that about half the uptick between May and April came...
Read more »
This is Mark Dow. Brad is away.
China has become the obsession that Japan was back in the 80s. And rightly so. It is a huge place, with a robust secular growth force underlying it (remember the conditional convergence growth hypothesis?). Rumors of China doing this or that have become a daily staple of the...
Read more »
TweetMeme – Finance