Who owns US debt

[Melon]

Last report data was November due to reporting lag. You can see how the amount of foreign held debt was increasing.
https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/slt_table5.html

[samsingh]

1. how much of a vulnerability is this?

[Volaris]

2. Not small. Denmark sold 100 million? worth of bonds the other day, and the DOW dropped 900 points.

If JUST EUROPE sells off our debt they hold, it will likley result in an instant economic depression here. The bond and commodity markets will go haywire, the dow will follow and inflation will skyrocket. Exports will drop to almost nothing to Europe, and if Greenland is invaded, the first 'action' other than shooting at us in self defense will be NATO economic sanctions.

Ask Iran how being a pariah state is working out for them.

[Melon]

3. $100 million is really...nothing.

It’s very small. Every day the US trades 100’s of billions. I believe that number has been up to a trillion in a day.

It was not the single transaction that did anything. It was the overall news and wider implications.

[A HERETIC I AM]

4. The problem with that scenario is they have to have buyers

The bond market is an "Over-The-Counter" market, not an exchange like the NYSE is, and as such there are no "Market Makers". No one is obligated to purchase any bonds put up for sale, and the US Treasury is under no obligation to redeem bonds before their maturity date.

Many people think holders of Treasuries can "Call in their debt" (I know you did not say that) but it just doesn't work that way.

There has to be willing buyers at the price the holder wants to sell. If there aren't, the seller will likely sell at a huge loss.

The bond market is sort of self correcting, in that there will be a point that the yield on a particular series offered for sale becomes so appealing that someone will buy them. The problem with that, is yield is only realized at maturity, not during the period the bonds are held. Buying ten year paper for instance with 8.5 years left to maturity is a long time to realize your gains.

However, if enough of the European Central Banks and the rest of the world all of the sudden started offering US Debt paper for sale all at once, the price of the entire spectrum of Treasuries would plummet and yields would rise, which did happen over the last few days to a small degree with the moves Japanese banks initiated.

Foreign holders certainly can have a dramatic effect on the price and yield of US Treasuries, but being able to actually sell them? That's a different story entirely.

[Melon]

5. Not really. The dollar and US debt is seen as the safest

Investment possible currently. This could change, but it’s the reason everyone is invested in it. The US has never defaulted. The US can also just buy the debt. We have our own currency so the government would just buy it. They do this daily.

[A HERETIC I AM]

7. That was the perception carefully crafted over decades, especially since WWII

But it is not engraved in stone that it should remain thus forever.

Trumpy is and has been doing massive damage to that perception and there is nothing physically keeping anyone from sustaining the US Dollar as the worlds reserve currency. Never ending deficits and a national debt load that will soon become unsustainable will hurt the value of the dollar and anyone holding dollar reserves will be hurt along with it.

It might not happen overnight, but there are certainly moves by the various economic powerhouses around the world, the EU and China chief among them, to reduce the stranglehold the US$ has held over international commerce in the past.

We have our own currency so the government would just buy it. They do this daily.

As I said previously, neither the Treasury nor the Federal Reserve is under any obligation whatsoever to purchase our own debt paper. They may in order to stabilize markets, but that just adds to the negative side of the balance sheet, and sooner or later, international markets are going to call that bluff.

There will come a point where we will owe so much to ourselves that the interest alone eats up too much of the annual tax revenue to be sustainable.

And sure, the debt paper is denominated in US Dollars and we own the printing presses, so theoretically we would never have to declare insolvency and could print our way out of debt.

Take a wild guess what the consequences of that would be!

[Melon]

8. I agree that the Trump is eroding

The standing of the dollar. But there are no real alternatives currently as solid.

We own the currency. The US will absolutely print more to cover bond debt. $100M doesn’t affect anything on a daily trade. It would take the same in Billions. The US has a $31Trillion economy and can move a trillion dollars in a day. It would cause short term inflation, but would still be covered by the US. On the flip side, it could drastically strengthen the other currency by much more than it affects the US, which could be even more damaging.

[MichMan]

6. People who believe the stock market is "rigged" and buy treasury bills instead of equities

Last edited Wed Jan 21, 2026, 01:56 PM - Edit history (1)

Along with those who are risk adverse or want a balanced portfolio

[Prairie Gates]

9. NOTE: They're all going to pile into this thread