Foreign Cenbank Holdings of US Obligations Weekly Update — to October 28, 2009

The Fed’s own MBS holdings slid by just $2.802 billion, while foreign central banks sold off a bit more MBS than that. Meanwhile, cenbanks bought a good amount of treasuries. Altogether a pretty ho-hum week on the US obligations front.

This week’s Reuters report¹ settled down significantly after last week’s excitement. The report was, as usual, based on the weekly update from the NY Fed’s H.4.1 table site.² Here is Doom’s updated CSV version³ of the agencies and treasuries foreign central bank holdings data set.

The treasuries buy was a healthy $8.651 billion, but last week’s splurge had been over $20 billion higher.

Agencies have resumed their steady march down, dropping a significant $3.788 billion.

The net change of US obligations was just $4.863 billion. About twice that amount on a regular basis would be better.

Twist’s ratios graphs continue down.

The Setser 52-week chart didn’t move much. The agencies line goes up a bit because the sell-off a year ago was over twice as intense.  Nevertheless, you can clearly see that a general trend toward moderation is apparent. What this is showing us is that we are now a few weeks past the anniversary of the peak of the crisis around September 18, 2008.

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Notes and References

[1]: "Foreign central banks US debt holdings rose in week – Fed", by Ellen Freilich, Reuters, October 29, 2009.

[2]: "H.4.1 Factors Affecting Reserve Balances", Federal Reserve Statistical Release (weekly), Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

[3]: The updated data set as a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file is here.

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