Question regarding the national debt.

I have searched for this answer, but cannot find it..so hope someone can help. i have heard here off and on that a good amount of our national debt is to China? Anyone have any specifics on this?

100 billion, this year.I can't remember if it was PBS on Wal-Mart program. Pretty bad when we spent 50 years telling americans commies were bad, then turn around and buy everything from them. Who else remembers that Chinese guy standing down a tank or the resulting massacre a few days later. Yep sold us another lie, those are our freedom loving red Chinese friends. How soon we forget when wally world told us how much money we could save buying from RED china.

Of $4 trillion in marketable treasury securities (about half the US public debt), China holds about $250 billion.

http://today.reuters.com/investing/financeArticle.aspx?type=economicNews&storyID=2005-12-20T192355Z_01_IMBALANCE_RTRIDST_0_ECONOMY-IMBALANCES-FACTBOX.XML

A good portion (and I don't know the exact percentage, probably no one does) is not OWED to China but is, in fact FINANCED by China.

Yes, boys and girls, that means that China is the bank on which we build our weapons of war. What's worse is:

1) They are currently in the process of a MASSIVE military build up
2) They are intent on having a moon colony by 2018

I don't know how many of you have read a book called "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (R. Heinlein), but if you have then you should be scared shitless. A moon base for china means the potential for the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, moon rocks. They could destroy entire cities with no threat of nuclear fallout and then move in.

It is no mystery to the rest of the world that American currency is a fiction, not backed by anything real. They say it is backed by the american worker, but everything we consume is made, where? CHINA! And when our economy collapses thanks to the greed of those at the top of the economic food chain, well, can you say FORECLOSURE.

And we are fighting a war in Iraq, how short sighted and pathetic. Thanks to BuschCo's meglomaniacal war there are not enough troops left inside our country to effectively fight off a full scale invasion, and I was quite surprised they didn't capitalize on Katrina and do so.

Because China manufactures a lot of things that Americans buy, but Chinese don't buy a lot of what Americans make, the Chinese end up with a lot of excess dollars. If we bought exactly the same amount of each other's goods, they would have lots of dollars and we would have lots of Yuan which would exactly match. But it isn't working like that for us.

So they hold billions of dollars and there isn't much in the US they need to buy. So they invest it. The safest investment for them is treasury bills--debt paper issued by the federal government to cover the difference between what the feds take in in taxes and what it pays out for everything from the war in Iraq to environmental protection to the president's salary. The annual deficit in in the range of $400 billion; but the accumulated US debt since 1789 is around $8 trillion.

But that debt would be issued whether the Chinese bought it or not. The Japanese still own more US debt than the Chinese. If either of them decided not to buy debt, the dollars would pile up. The surplus of dollars would make them "cheap" compared to other currencies, which would cause a currency crisis. That's the big concern these days.

with Japan. Now they (Japan)own 3/4 of the same islands that they couldn't take with bombs. Thank you Ronnie Reagan and the repiglet party.

weeks ago.

From memory China had about 6 % of our debt. There were 3 or 4 countries who had more but China was climbing the fastest.

The greatest part of our debt is held by pension funds and mutual funds and individual US investors.

generating debt, because we ain't got the money. With the profits on deposit in Chinese banks, Chinese banks then buy US Treasury notes, i.e. our debt, our IOUs. (They also buy gold contracts and Euros.)
We also owe a great deal to Japanese banks. The Japanese are habitual savers-- much like we are habitual spenders. They buy bonds through their national postal service and sock cash money away in savings accounts. Their banks have a long history of taking the godzillions of Yen on deposit and buying US Treasuries as a secure form of generating a return. Those Treasury notes are pieces of paper, sold at a certain value Y at time X and on the paper it says at time X plus n years, the paper will be redeemed at Y plus z percent interest, all done in US currency. About half of our national debt is owned by foreign creditors now, a percentage that has been steadily rising. This is not only the debt owed by our Federal government for borrowing to pay for its operations, but also the debt generated because we buy presently around 770 Billion dollars' worth more in foreign goods each year than we are able to sell in American made goods to foreign buyers. At a rate of 770 BILLION dollars of borrowing to cover our trade deficit per annum, the debt bomb grows rather quickly.
We also owe a great deal to banks in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf region. It's easy to see how that happens since the world buys petroleum from them, and they need to park their money in what they see as safe investments. The only way the US T bills are not a safe investment is if we default on our debts which would be the end of the world full stop, or if we hyperinflated our currency which may be nearly unavoidable now and would mean the end of the world in slower motion than a flat out default, or if our country was attacked and our government destroyed. Since we have been the one country on the planet that everyone was sure could not be attacked and would not have a change of government our debt looked to be the safest place to put one's spare billions. (that's another way of saying that global military hegemony has been our main economic policy since the present world currency system was put in place in the 1970s--being the biggest bully has ensured that we always have had borrowed money to spend on padding our consumer lifestyle.)
Because the debt bomb has become so large no one dares set it off, and no one knows how to defuse it without setting it off.

The United States makes two things of importance to the world economy:
1) the best military hardware in the world
2) the biggest debt piles in the world
These two facts are causally, alchemically related.

I think some leading Democrats understand the alchemy of this arrangement which as I said has characterized us more and more since we forced all world currencies to be pegged to the US dollar⁽¹⁾ instead of metal, and we began to shed our manufacturing base and transitioned from largest creditor in the world to largest debtor. Since they are aware of this and since they know nothing this garguantuan and dangerous can be changed overnight, they are practically no different than Republicans in their foreign policy and domestic policy. They want the same extortionate arrangement with the world to continue, but insist on a sort of garden-club sprucing up of the dirtier corners of our national life--planting a few daffodils and tidying up the margins of America.

1)technically they are all supposed to float relative to each other, on the global currencies exchanges. But practically, becasue in order to buy stuff internationally you need "hard" currency, that means most currencies float relative to what they buy in US dollars, the currency of the strongest country. This could all go upside down tomorrow if people suddenly stopped believing in the dollar, which suggests why Uncle Sluggo might decide to go all crazy on Iraq, if they threatened to accept payment in Euros for their oil.

a very good summary of the issues around this topic:

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20051201faresponse84710/brad-setser/how-scary-is-the-deficit.html

http://www.house.gov/tanner/foreignholdings.htm

Foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury securities now total $1.75 trillion. This accounts for approximately 41% of debt owed by the public. Some examples of foreign holdings include:
Japan $668 billion
China $217 billion
Caribbean Banking Centers $72 billion
OPEC Nations $48 billion

get taxed. Its that tax loop hole that the repiglets hide from the american working class. Also it never finds its way into the figures on how much % the rich pay into taxes, so the %is higher then it would be if they did count that money. Actually the 72 billion is lot lower then what it was when Clinton was in office, if I remember rightly.