Who Is Going To Buy The US Debt If This War Causes China, Russia To Turn On Us?

Zero Hedge ^ | 9-7-13 | Tyler Durden/Michael Snyder

[RKBA Democrat]

Full title: Who Is Going To Buy The US Debt If This War Causes China, Russia And The Rest Of The World To Turn On Us?

Yesterday we implied a difficult question when we illustrated the huge size of US Treasury bond holdings that China and Russia have between them - accounting for 25% of all foreign held debt - implicitly funding US standards of living (along with the Federal Reserve). The difficult question is "Can the U.S. really afford to greatly anger the rest of the world when they are the ones that are paying our bills?" What is going to happen if China, Russia and many other large nations stop buying our debt and start rapidly dumping U.S. debt that they already own? If the United States is not very careful, it is going to pay a tremendous economic price for taking military action in Syria.

[Bryanw92]

Debt?? It isn’t really debt if you never plan to pay it off.

Perhaps this is another part of the Cloward-Piven: piss off China so they stop buying our IOUs. That would effectively end our consumer-based economy and then no one would care if we go communist.

[dennisw]

excellent analysis!!

[pierrem15]

As long as the Fed cares to support it.

[Toddsterpatriot]

The question is how much of our debt would you have to dump to crash the system? Would Russia’s share be enough?

Russia holds about $138 billion. Of a market that grew $6 trillion since Obama took office. Less than 1% of our debt.

MAJOR FOREIGN HOLDERS OF TREASURY SECURITIES

We wouldn't even notice.

[tet68]

Who Is Going To Buy The US Debt If This War Causes China, Russia And The Rest Of The World To Turn On Us?

Who else but the American people!
It won’t be pretty either.

[jy8z]

Who else but the American people! It won’t be pretty either.

Y'all just don't worry now...I'll buy it all. I just got a new cartridge for the printer. Someone please let me know how many zeros to add and how many bills to print. (:

[tet68]

Hey, that’s the Fed’s solution. Do they know about you?

[The Duke]

There's a very, simple answer: the Federal Reserve. It will print enough money to buy all the debt if need be.

And if I'm a television manufacturer in China I'm going to want $20k for that big screen television, and that gallon of gas is going to cost us $15.

Everybody (except the folks counting on government handouts) can play this game.

[Mase]

Usually when dumping is a good idea

When was the last time a foreign government "dumped" US debt instruments?

With regard to "to who," it does not matter. There won't be enough buyers anyway

When was the last time the US was unable to sell debt instruments in the open market?

who has spare change to buy a trillion dollars worth of US paper

Uh, huh. What's China's annual current account deficit with the US? What will they do with all those dollars? They can either buy our debt/invest in our economy, buy our goods and services, or hide the $$ in their mattresses.

The USA will be unable to sell more debt because there will be too much of cheaper one on the market.

Cheaper debt? People/governments won't buy US debt because other countries will be issuing debt that yields less and offers less risk? Sure.

You will need RMB and CDN and whatnot - and they will be gladly sold to you...

Do you really believe that the US dollar is going to be supplanted by the renminbi? You have more faith in the Chinese currency than the US dollar? Either you are a doomer's doomer, or you don't know much about the Chinese economy.

In the end, the USA will default.

Yeah, that $70 trillion in household net worth is peanuts.

China has a great opportunity to buy themselves a great prize.

LOL! It wasn't all that long ago the same thing was said about Japan. In the late 80's, I had Japanese businessmen telling me how easy it was for them to do to the US economically what they couldn't do militarily. How'd that work out for them? Do you happen to recall how much the Japanese lost on Rockefeller Center and Pebble Beach?

Doom, it's not just for breakfast anymore.

[expat_panama]

the USA will default.

--making all outstanding US debt worthless.  If anyone here actually believes that, then I'd be happy to buy every penny of the $17T debt with solid gold bars.  Here's my offer: I'll trade a bar of gold that looks just like this:

--for every $T worth of T-bills you got.  Heck freepmail me today and I'll give you one of these bars for just ONE $10,000 T-bill.  OK, seriously I know nobody's going to take me up on this because everyone knows the 'US default' story's a crock.  Some folks just like to rant I guess...