The U.S. dollar is standing at the edge of a cliff, and most people don’t even know it.
Data released by the New York Federal Reserve shows that foreign central banks have been net sellers of U.S. treasuries over the past five weeks, with $48 billion having been sold since late July, and $32 billion in just the last two weeks.
The U.S. runs budget deficits each year. If foreigners stop buying treasuries—or worse, start selling them—the dollar could be in big trouble.
The reduction in treasuries “comes as a big surprise and it is definitely worrying,” said Hans Redeker, foreign exchange strategy chief at bnp Paribas, one of Europe’s biggest banks.
The Telegraph reported that, according to Redeker, the numbers demonstrate “that world central banks are in a hurry to get out of the U.S.”
The nation that analysts are watching especially closely at this stage is China. Whether or not Beijing is selling its dollars can’t be officially confirmed until November, when the Treasury releases its tic data. However, top Beijing officials have been signaling for at least two years that dollar sales are increasingly imminent.
This past August, two Chinese government officials highlighted China’s massive U.S. dollar holdings (which include treasuries) and how it supports the value of the U.S. currency. They also noted that Beijing could use those holdings as a political weapon to counter congressional calls to revalue the yuan and impose trade sanctions on Chinese goods. Chinese state media referred to the country’s stockpile of U.S. dollars as its economic “nuclear option,” capable of destroying the dollar at will.
Beijing also clearly signaled that it would begin “diversifying” out of the dollar earlier this year when it announced plans to rebalance its $1.34 trillion currency reserves, which are mostly U.S. bonds. Already Beijing has created a $300 billion investment fund to use those dollars to purchase other assets in an attempt to increase its investment returns.
It should come as no shock, then, that China would now be selling its dollar holdings.
The danger, as the Telegraph notes, relates to the fact that China holds such a large amount of treasuries. Any confirmed evidence that China was no longer supporting the dollar, and was actually selling it, risks setting off “an unstoppable stampede” in which other nations would seek to dump their holdings before China swamps the market and demand for dollars is overwhelmed.
The implications of a run on the dollar due to Chinese treasury-dumping go far beyond just the value of the greenback. More on the story.
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