Hey, isn’t that what Greenspan, Bush and GOP congressmen have been wanting to occur for 8 years? Maybe they’ll get their wish, with the “only” collateral damage the demise of an orderly consumer market for mortgages.

The resulting charts tell a story like the one in the second chart above. We put up those charts last Friday in an article which also included a link to the data set as a comma separated values (CVS) file.

http://housingdoom.com/2008/08/29/foreign-central-banks-and-agency-debt-2000-to-present/

ndk — i don’t quite know what to say about the santiago principles, as the actual principles haven’t been disclosed. i don’t have high hopes tho. I think SWFs need to agree to something that would in effect create a SWF COFER data base, i.e. data on their aggregate currency split and bond/equity/alternatives/ perhaps commodities split. And if the biggest firm still isn’t willing to disclose its size (and the potentially fastest growing fund — the cic — hasn’t disclosed anything yet either, including just how much fx it has bought and when from the central bank) I don’t think you will get very far through this exercise. I hope to be surprised though — the evolution of ADIA’s disclosure via its website is one test, ADIC’s disclosure is another. And I am still waiting for the CIC to match norway’s transparency.

moreover, recent events suggests state banks and state firms probably warrant as much attention as SWFs, so their are lots of vehicles for state investment that won’t fall within the scope of the good practices.

Also, you say there is a rate at which the rollover doesn’t “work” for the GSEs. I think the GSEs will be willing to rollover even if it loses them (a bit of) money. So they lose a little money, so what? What they have to avoid IMHO is a rate or an auction which indicates a lack of confidence, because then things will quickly snowball out of control.

Stealth bailout of whom/what? What is the present cost?

julieng — i like the term “stealth” bailout better than my term (the quiet bailout). i basically agree with your point, but also think there has been a meaningful reallocation away from agencies on a high frequency basis, and in this case, there is good reason to think it is more than noise.

if others disagree, i am all ears.

i also incidentally think your point that the agencies are an inner border problem (i.e. lots of us financial institutions hold lots of agencies) is true, and i plead guilty to the charge of emphasizing the china and russia angle a bit too much. they matter more on a flow than a stock basis. that matters. but it is important not to loose sight of the extensive domestic holdings of agencies.