Monday, August 10, 2015

Revealing the mystery Belgian buyer of U.S. Treasuries. It was the ECB.


Back in May, that goldbug, Austrian economics blog, Zerohedge, wrote a post trying to figure out the big mystery of why the Belgians were buying so many Treasuries.

Well, it wasn't the Belgians and it wasn't some secret Chinese account held in Belgium as Zerohedge clumsily tries to suggest.

It was the ECB, acting through other European central banks. The ECB had been buying dollars and selling euro at the beginning of the year as part of their "price setting" of euro. That is, price setting lower.

Nearly all Eurozone member countries added to their Treasury holdings in that period. That was the ECB doing all the dollar buying.

3 comments:

Ralph Musgrave said...

That was presumably motivated by the brilliant idea that every country can escape a recession by exporting more.

It's always struck me that it would be a idea to check up on how much Earthling produced stuff residents of Mars and Jupiter want to buy from us. But what do I know? Perhaps the ECB checked up on that.

Random said...

The ECB printin money. Won't that cause super duper hyperinflation. And why can't they go on an infrastructure spending spree?

Random said...

Ralph, they were already dumping cars in the sea to earn fictional Atlantis dollars. :)