U.S. Budget and Economy

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...

My prior post looked at the distribution of net worth according to the 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances . As mentioned, net worth appears to be heavily skewed such that about 80 percent of families had a net worth that was less than the average from 1989 to 2004. Whereas that result came from looking at net worth by percentiles of net worth, the following graph looks at net worth by percentile of income : The actual numbers and their sources can be found at this link . As can be seen, there is a positive correlation between net worth and income. That is, those with higher income tend to have a higher net worth. The data also shows that the median net worth of the top ten percent of income earners more than doubled from 1995 to 2004. The median net worth of the 80 to 90 percentile nearly doubled and the net worth of the 60 to 80 percentile went up about 71 percent during that period. The median net worth of the other 60 percent of income earners gained much less with the net wor...