From the department of treasury website, here are the top 15 foreign holders of United States debt.


top15-us-debt

George Bush managed to nearly double the national debt of the United States from just 8 years in office, from $5.7 trillion when he took office to $10.6 trillion when he left.  Obama may have inherited this nightmare of debt implosion, but he has no intention of steering the ship back on course.  Obama’s mission is to socialize the losses of every failing industry in the United States, and he could easily double the national debt again in half the time it took George Bush to do so.   With so many new debt sales on the line, its important to keep track of who currently owns our debt, and who has the continued capacity to do so in the future…

China - From the list above, they are the number one holder of United States debt.  For years, their economy was unstoppable.  Yet from this recent Wall Street Journal article,

China recorded a fiscal deficit of 111.01 billion yuan ($16.23 billion) for 2008, as government spending surged in the final month of last year when Beijing ramped up its stimulus measures to boost the flagging economy.

And for Kiplinger’s view of China…

China is staggering under the near simultaneous collapse of overseas demand for its exports and of its domestic property market. Large numbers of factories are shutting their doors, and those that remain are scaling back orders…As China’s exports decline, it will have fewer dollars to recycle. Inevitably, that will push U.S. interest rates up.


Japan – Their economy continues to weaken, and from this Bloomberg article, investors are not eager to dump money on U.S. treasuries.

Forty percent of Japanese investors said there is a risk that the U.S. government will default on its debt, a survey published by Barclays Capital showed. Almost 34 percent of the 66 respondents in the poll sent to Japanese institutional investors from Jan. 26 to Jan. 28 said there is a “significant” or “slight” risk that the U.S. will lose its AAA sovereign debt rating this year. Twenty-two percent said they were concerned about the credit risk of German government bonds.

United Kingdom -The U.K. financial Services Authority attempts to sugar coat it by saying “weighted to the downside and, while the effects of fiscal stimulus and monetary easing remain unclear, the recession may be deeper and more prolonged than expected.”  (From International Herald Tribune) But it sounds like their capacity to buy U.S. debt has diminished!

Carribean Banking Centers – Give me a break!    They stopped buying in November, and now they are just rolling it over to buy time!

Oil Exporters – $40 oil is not good for short term thinking economies who to quickly came to DEPEND on $150 oil.  Read this Herald Tribune article, and ask yourself if they have the capacity to buy more U.S. debt.

The combined economic growth of the six Gulf Arab oil-exporting countries is expected to fall to 3.5 percent this year from 6.8 percent in 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Masood Ahmed, director of the IMF’s Middle East and Central Asia department, said Sunday in Dubai that the countries – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain – were expected as a whole to post a fiscal deficit representing 3.1 percent of gross domestic product, compared with a surplus of 22.8 percent of GDP in 2008.

Shall I go on…?

It’s becoming very clear that the department of the treasury will have an insanely difficult time selling as much new debt that’s being offered, especially at record low interest rates…  Let’s not even talk about what kind of impact this will have on mortgage rates and housing prices!

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