Why you should care Beijing’s recent sales of securities are triggering concerns that it might dump U.S. securities for leverage in the ongoing spat with Washington. It was an unnerving piece of data for investors two weeks back, buried halfway down an esoteric spreadsheet released by the U.S. government that tracks how many Treasuries foreign investors buy and sell. China, the largest foreign creditor to the U.S. government with total Treasury holdings in excess of $1.2 trillion, sold $20 billion of securities with a maturity exceeding one year in March, according to U.S. government data. The sales amounted to China’s...