Major Foreign Holders of Treasury Securities
Note: An updated version of the following post can be found at this link . Each month, the Treasury Department posts updated estimates of the foreign holdings of U.S Treasuries by country at this link . It also posts estimates going back to March 2000 at this link . The following graph shows the totals for all countries by the type of treasury security and the totals for the three countries with the largest holdings. The purple line shows the grand total of all treasury securities held by all foreign countries, private and public. As can be seen, it has been increasing steadily since early 2002 and has accelerated somewhat in the past year. The yellow line shows those securities held by "official institutions", defined on page 7 of the Report on U.S. Portfolio Holdings of Foreign Securities at End-Year 2004 as follows: Official institutions consist primarily of national government and multinational institutions involved in the formulation of international monetary policy...