Pie Chart of Who Owns the Debt, and Bar Chart of Who's Been Buying It
The Skeptical Optimist
A lot of web traffic has been coming this way to see the pie chart I did last year (showing who owns our national debt), and I realized it's time I updated it, because the US Treasury now has newer estimates of who owns our debt and how much they've been buying.
The updated "Pie Chart of Who Owns the National Debt" (below) is a slightly different mix, but still looks much the same as before. In other words, the holdings of the Chinese mainlanders still don't look scary to me.
But that pie chart isn't enough any more. Several months ago, debt phobes began asserting that "Asians" have been propping us up by buying more than half our debt. (Notice the slight difference in the message? "They might not own half yet, but they've recently been buying up more than half of the new treasury instruments.") So, I checked the facts on that, too. The results, once again, were no surprise.
If we're supposed to be scared of the foreigners who are buying up our debt, I guess we'd better stop looking across the Pacific for the culprits, and start keeping an eye on the Brits—because in the six months through March '06, they increased their holdings almost six times as much as the Chinese did ($84B vs $15B). Not only that, but the Canadians were right behind the Chinese ($12B vs $15B).
In that environment, it's tough to figure out who we're supposed to be scared of, isn't it? I gave up a long time ago; I'm just grateful they're helping (indirectly) to fund our economy's growth, and helping (indirectly) to keep our tax rates lower than they'd otherwise have to be to keep our debt burden (debt-to-GDP ratio) from growing. (Thank you, foreigners! Maybe you should consider immigrating...)
In any case, the two biggest groups of T-bond buyers swamped everybody else (see the two longest bars at the top of the chart). Those two groups are made up of you, me, our families, our friends, and our neighbors.
That gives me an idea: Let's keep our economy growing, and let's keep buying those T-bonds for our children and grandchildren, how about it?
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