See today’s Houston Chronicle article entitled Foreign holdings of US debt hit $5.46 trillion”. Putting this number into perspective, this represents an increase over the past two years of roughly $1.26 trillion.   As I document in my November 5, 2010 blog posting entitled “Political economy and the (inflationary) future“, foreign holdings of US debt two years ago stood at around $4.2 trillion.

For my friends out there who are data geeks, the US Treasury Department regularly updates information concerning foreign holdings of treasury securities (by country) at http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/mfh.txt.