In the aftermath of Saudi Arabia’s explicit threat to sell off US Treasurys (of which according to the NYT it had some $750 billion) should the US pursue legislation that could hold it liable for the September 11 bombings, Wall Street’s analysts quickly tried to calculate whether Saudi Arabia had anywhere remotely close to that amount of US paper available for liquidation.
As a reminder, despite starting to release data on foreign ownership of Treasuries in 1974, the Treasury’s policy has been to not disclose Saudi holdings, and it has instead grouped them with those of 14 other mostly OPEC nations, including Kuwait, Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates. The group held $281 billion as of February, down from a record of $298.4 billion in July. For more than a hundred other countries, from China to the Vatican, the Treasury provides a detailed monthly breakdown of how much U. S. debt each owns.
A few days after the NYT’s disturbing article on Saudi Treasury liquidation, in hopes of bringing some clarity to this all too important topic, we penned an article titled “Does Saudi Arabia Have $750 Billion In Assets To Sell?” we cited Stone McCarthy which analyzed oil exporter reserve holdings and observed that “at the end of January, Asian oil exporters held $563.6 billion of U. S. securities, with Treasuries and U. S. equities accounting for 92.2% of the total. Treasury holdings totaled $268.2 billion.”
This post was published at Zero Hedge on 05/16/2016.
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