Belgium got 135 billion, the Netherlands 19, what’s the deal with that?

Would you make them, for the benefit of those of us who are always looking for things to blame America for?

The Russians really shouldn’t have any extraordinary incentive to stockpile it, or at least I can’t imagine what it would be.

If you mean firewalled in terms of influence, sure. But stopping runaway movements in exchange rates is pretty much what those oligarchs want the central bank to do. It’s what central banks are for and it’s why they need dollar reserves. If the oligarchs want to invest in US bonds, either because they think it’s a good risk/return proposal or because they want to demonstrate submissiveness to the Mighty Hegemon or whatever, they do it through central banks.

It’s worth remembering that the whole issue didn’t emerge five minutes ago. In 1970, you couldn’t do a multizillion forex trade in milliseconds. So, if you received USD from your customers, you had little choice but to run a substantial float of dollars. Up until the late sixties, dollar liquidity tended to end up back in the US as a matter of course. After that, you had a market for dollar investments outside the US (the eurodollar market), and this rapidly growing pool of dollars outside the US Treasury or the Fed’s control became an important factor in the globalisation of finance.

But this wasn’t because the US had gained *more* control over the financial system. We went from $35=1 oz of gold and everyone else on a crawling peg linked to that, pretty obviously a system of undoubted US final control of monetary policy, to an all-floating system.

No, it isn’t. Dubai is supposed to be worried about being attacked by Israel if it doesn’t put lots of money into T-bills? That’s not even remotely plausible.

OK, I think that when you say “Saudis” you are conflating the Saudi central bank, the Saudi government and its SWFs, and the Saudi people. Same confusion as earlier (#137). The Saudi central bank isn’t putting $1 trillion into business investments.