more China stuff… Good luck with that!
China, the U.S. government’s largest creditor, is asking “the U.S. to maintain its good credit, to honor its promises and to guarantee the safety of China’s assets,” Wen said today in Beijing at a press briefing after the annual meeting of the legislature.
“China should be concerned, in that they hold roughly a third of their almost $2 trillion in FX reserves in U.S. Treasuries,” said Michael Pond, an interest-rate strategist in New York at Barclays Capital Inc. one of 16 primary dealers that trade with the Federal Reserve, in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “As a Chinese official put it a couple weeks ago, and I’ll paraphrase, he said, where else will we go?”
China held $696 billion of U.S. government securities at the end of last year, 46 percent more than 12 months earlier.
Money-market rates show short-term borrowing costs are still increasing as banks hoard cash after almost $1.2 trillion of writedowns and losses since the start of 2007.