I’m confused. Wasn’t there a post here recently where someone said that the debt wasn’t that big a deal, and wouldn’t be until it hit 90%? And yet, those charts show it higher than that.
And I can’t figure out how to search for what I’m talking about. I only remember the gist, not the exact words.
I was responding to your post, not supporting any previous. You wrote “The biggest owner of U.S. debt is…Americans. By far.” This indeed seems misleading, given that American investors own about one-half of “Total Treasury Debt Held by the Public”, exactly the same as foreigners do.
Many of my posts are intended to educate rather than to argue. Your own phrasing (“more than TWICE that amount”) suggests that you knew the numbers (68% is “more than TWICE” 32%) but preferred to obfuscate.
Whether one chooses to consider SocSec Trust Fund to be an “American investor” is moot, but I consider it least obfuscatory to separate such debts as I did. (And many of the same shrill voices on the wrong side of debt debates will insist that such paper debt is meaningless paper that shouldn’t enter into any accounting.)
And BTW, voltaire: “The assertion was that China was the biggest owner of U.S. debt, and that’s not even close to being true.”
The SocSec Trust Fund, the Federal Reserve System, and one or two other U.S. agencies are among the largest holders of T-bonds. Other than U.S. government’s own agencies, I think that the Chinese Government is indeed today the biggest owner of U.S. debt. China beats Japan’s total by $1.2 to 0.9 trillion and, IIUC, the latter figure sums Japan’s private and public debt holders whereas, IIUC, nearly all of China’s T-bonds are government-held.
Am I wrong?
I don’t really see the qualifier of “held by the public” as a necessary distinction to make for the sake of this discussion. A lot of the misinformed chatter on this subject amounts to “so what if we screw over the holdings of all those foreigners who hold the majority of our debt?” and I think it’s very relevant to point out that by doing that we’d be mostly screwing up Americans’ investments and our own economy.
I post with a similar intent. Perhaps I should have taken more time to elaborate, explain and provide a cite, but my post was certainly not intended to obfuscate. (and I don’t really see how it did) I was posting something I knew to be true from past reading on the subject, so the exact numbers weren’t immediately available to me, just the essential facts.
And thank you for providing the numbers and breaking it down a bit. Whether or not my post was obfuscatory, yours was certainly less so. Regardless, I saw the facts contained in your post as a good independent confirmation of my assertion.
You are certainly not wrong. But as I already touched on, I don’t see those distinctions and qualifiers as being that important to this discussion, or counter to the point I was trying to make. The posts I was responding to were factually incorrect, and I did my bit to point that out, since it seems to be a common misconception. Thanks for your contribution towards clearing it up.