From Bloomberg:
China’s ownership of U.S. government debt fell in December by the most since 2000, allowing Japan to regain the position as the largest foreign holder of Treasury securities.
Japan’s holdings rose 1.5 percent in December to $768.8 billion while China’s dropped 4.3 percent to $755.4 billion, Treasury Department figures today showed. China allowed its short-term Treasury bills to mature and replaced them with a smaller amount of longer-term notes and bonds, the data showed.
China, with the world’s largest central bank reserves, may be moving money to other investments from the relative safety of Treasuries as the U.S. runs record budget deficits, economists said. China’s Treasury holdings peaked at $801.5 billion in May, and net sales in November and December were the first consecutive months of reductions since late 2007.
“If this scale of selling is sustained, then it would suggest that China is taking larger steps to diversify than it has in the past,” said Win Thin, a senior currency strategist in New York at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., which manages about $40 billion in assets.
