Sandy Leeds has an interesting post today concerning foreign holdings of publicly held US Treasury securities. According to Mr. Leeds, currently there is $8.6 trillion outstanding of publicly held US Treasury securities. The US Treasury’s website provides a table that breaks the debt down in terms of foreign holdings of these securities; thus slightly less than 50% of US Treasury securities outstanding is held by foreign investors, for what that’s worth. Also, China accounts for roughly 10% of total foreign holdings of US Treasury securities, and Japan accounts for more than 9% of that total:
