The Mystery Of Saudi Treasury Holdings Solved: US Reveals Saudi Holdings For The First Time
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.”
SMRA speculated further, adding that “these figures reflect holdings that Treasury can directly attribute to the Asian oil exporting countries. Regular readers of our updates on the TIC data know that foreign investors often hold securities at custodial institutions in other countries. For example, in February, the five major custodial centers held $1.1 trillion of Treasury securities.
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