Check this list of current foreign holders of US government debt. I found that while reading Economic Fragility Underestimated – Collapse May Be Imminent on Seeking Alpha.

The 4 Key Reasons an Economic Collapse is Likely Imminent

1. The U.S. has unprecedented, massive amounts of current and coming debt.
2. Foreign countries have experienced their own crises, and they cannot offer added levels of debt funding for the U.S. Even if they could, they are unlikely to do so.
3. Productivity is declining, and everything the government is doing is further hurting productivity.
4. The U.S. is printing unprecedented, massive amounts of money and no longer has an ability to control inflation and deflation.

The US treasury department list of Treasury Security holders is updated I assume every month, last stats from April. Note that almost every major holder has less US government debt in April than in May, despite the US government selling record amounts of debt to fund it’s bailouts of the cancerous financial leeches which abuse the term ‘industry’ beyond belief (‘industries’ produce things, and debt is not a thing).

So who is buying the rest? I assume we, the US tax payers are. And please don’t spout any of that Fox news generated nonsense about ‘tax and spend liberals’, this is about gross economic collapse fueled by 20 years of removing financial regulations, coupled with humanity reaching a peak in per capita natural resource consumption, then a physical peak in gross natural resource production, especially in oil, which is the primary resource that drives our modern non-sustainable ‘economy’.

Watch that chart to see what happens. Since the US needs to sell some 1.5 trillion more debt this year if I get the numbers right to keep afloat, and since increasing amounts of the debt held now by China and other major debt holders is short term, the real stat to track is who is buying the long term debt.

I suspect that the Chinese and others are now in the process of moving their longer term debt, as it comes due, to shorter term positions, which avoids creating the appearance of dropping long term investments in US bonds while actually creating the situation where they can exit slowly by translating dollar holdings into real things, like oil companies, natural resource contracts, and so on.

This is a big game, and the USA is losing.

Good video of Harper’s Kevin Baker’s July 2009 cover article: Barack Hoover Obama: The best and the brightest blow it again.

It’s pretty long, worth watching. But I have to say, the people who called in to that c-span show, both left and right, don’t give me much room for optimism. The right continues to ignore every single actual foundational component of our current issues, the Libertarians continue to blindly regurgitate their absurd anti government, pro free market foolishness long after the current financial collapse has once again proven, as if this even needed proving, that free markets don’t exist, they are fictions designed to disguise the blatant grab of power and wealth by those who espouse them. Not to say actual free markets don’t exist, but they aren’t run by oligarchs and cartels, they are individual, non corporate, and, most important, local and community based.

No hope in this administration I’m sad to say, find a copy of the July Harper’s magazine and find out why, or watch the video, it covers most of the key points.

Remember: without single payer health care, dismantling of the current financial oligarchs, and a serious redoing of the corporate lobbying industry (like banning it completely) we will not be able to move on to the next phase of our existence.
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Two quick ones:

1: USA Fire Sale, 2nd Meeting, June 2009: Political capital call – Eric Janszen. A somewhat satirical view of what a meeting between China and Geitner might look like today. This is part 2, here is Part 1. This post is worth reading because it’s basically true, and even if China isn’t going to say these very words to the US, they should. Now. Before the US is allowed to further destroy their future in a vain attempt to prop up a corrupt and rotten financial ‘industry’ (though the use of the term ‘industry’ requires quotes, since it produces nothing of value, and simply filters money towards its primary benefactors).

The result, probably? The American Empire Is Bankrupt. Covered further in De-Dollarization: Dismantling America’s Financial-Military Empire: The Yekaterinburg Turning Point.

“This means the end of the dollar,” Hudson told me. “It means China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran are forming an official financial and military area to get America out of Eurasia. The balance-of-payments deficit is mainly military in nature. Half of America’s discretionary spending is military. The deficit ends up in the hands of foreign banks, central banks. They don’t have any choice but to recycle the money to buy U.S. government debt. The Asian countries have been financing their own military encirclement. They have been forced to accept dollars that have no chance of being repaid. They are paying for America’s military aggression against them. They want to get rid of this.”

2. The Message of Overconsumption. If you’re fond of your denialism about the status quo (ie, economy, environment, resources), these graphs are nice reminders that in fact, you cannot enter into exponential growth and expect to have long term success. For those of you who don’t follow such things, exponential growth is the essence of our modern ‘capital’ based economies (see Hubbert’s discussion of the ‘culture of money’ as well, which is a critical point to understand). More on this topic at hubbertpeak.com.

Capital as found in our interest based systems is a method of finance that lends money, debt, which then requires growth to pay it back. Failure to generate this growth means the system fails. I know, of course, that denialists are all sheep who don’t use actual facts or data to come to their conclusions, so no amount of real data will ever change their minds, but for the rest of us, there might be some hope. And the sheep will just follow along eventually anyway, once you explain to them what the new reality and truth is…

Stop buying from corporations, start localizing, there is nothing they can do about this if more and more people refuse to gut their local communities, and start buying local, that money stays local, in your community. It’s a simple idea. Manufactored needs are not real needs, step out of the con-game.

Just a short note: check out this recent fora.tv video, Healing Mother Earth: E.O. Wilson

Long discussion about various ecological and biological issues, along with political etc, confronting the planet.

He has that sort of required view that some type of reform can fix this situation, but otherwise the video is pretty interesting, check it out.

What can you say? Things aren’t looking good.

Recently, in Barrons we have this interview with William Black:

Barron’s: Just how serious is this credit crisis? What is at stake here for the American taxpayer?

Black: Mopping up the savings-and-loan crisis cost $150 billion; this current crisis will probably cost a multiple of that. The scale of fraud is immense. This whole bank scandal makes Teapot Dome [of the 1920s] look like some kid’s doll set. Unless the current administration changes course pretty drastically, the scandal will destroy Barack Obama’s presidency. The Bush administration was even worse. But they are out of town. This will destroy Obama’s administration, both economically and in terms of integrity.

Yep, that’s about that. Or we can read to a recent winner of the (fake) nobel prize in economics (created because, as you hopefully have figured out by now, economics doesn’t merit a prize for anything), Joseph Stiglitz, Stiglitz Says Ties to Wall Street Doom Bank Rescue :

“All the ingredients they have so far are weak, and there are several missing ingredients,” Stiglitz said in an interview yesterday. The people who designed the plans are “either in the pocket of the banks or they’re incompetent.”

The Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, isn’t large enough to recapitalize the banking system, and the administration hasn’t been direct in addressing that shortfall, he said. Stiglitz said there are conflicts of interest at the White House because some of Obama’s advisers have close ties to Wall Street.

A bit more of this interview under the fold.
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