International Investing

Gartman crunches the numbers and finds that China’s purchases of new treasuries fell off a cliff in 2007:

Chinese Net Purchases of Treasuries in billions of dollars

2002 34.1
2003 47.9
2004 77.4
2005 84.9
2006 63.2
2007 -4.1
Chinese Purchases As A Percentage of New Treasuries Issued
2002 12.7%
2003 11.8
2004 21.3
2005 29.6
2006 35.8
2007 - 2.5 (through Sept. 30th)

In other words, last year, China became a net seller of US treasury securities in the past half year… or at least it would appear that that is what has happened given the data. However, we have to acknowledge that the US government’s statistics on this may be misleading, for it is possible that China has been buying agencies and/or has moved to buy US treasuries through Hong Kong or elsewhere.