but the key thing is that my measure for Agencies almost certainly overstates Russia’s current holdings. Russia has run its holdings of s-term agencies down to zero. so all of the remaining bonds in the “Agencies” category are long-term bonds. The US data would only capture their sale on the secondary market if Russia initially sold those bonds to a US domiciled investor. If Russia sold those bonds to a UK bank and the UK bank sold them to a US bank, the US data wouldn’t show any Russian sales — only the sale of the a bond by a UK investor to a US investor. B/c of this, my estimate — which is based on the TIC data — likely understates russia’s agency sales and thus overstates it US holdings.

it though is also possible that Russia ran down its dollar holdigns more than it wanted in q4 08 when its reserves were bleeding and it subsequently has reloaded.

1. The U.S. is doing it wrong
2. China is doing it right
3. Russia, look out for ‘em!
4. The U.S. is goin’ down
5. The dollar is going to “collapse”
6. Did I mention the U.S. is doing it wrong?
7. Did I mention China is doing it right?
8. America is a warmongering and wasteful nation, oh and it’s also doing everything wrong and has no chance to doing anything right – that’s how wrong America is doing it
9. China – doin’ it right even more now than 5 seconds ago.
10. Collapse of the dollar. Any time now.

A EUR breakup is neither desirable nor likely. The very strong tensions present in the EU regarding (1) stimulus and deficits (2) responsibility for cross border consumer banking (3) financial system supervision and architecture can all be solved if/when Germany adopts a role with greater responsibility and, alas, assertiveness. The first is on ice until the elections later this year and the latter suffers from some imperfections in Germany’s past. Patience please. No one is minding either deficit limits or competition policy. Anymore. And, no one is working on enlargement either. Suspensions may be more likely..

Thanks for linking to the respected mr Mc Williams’ article. His purpose must have been to demonstrate the impossibility of ditching the Euro. But his last sentence is fine: Strangulation. That is precisely what will happen to small unruly economies, but they can take pride in having contributed to the ECB’s credibility, which is good for the long term

Yeah. Except not everything in politics and geopolitics and finance and economics IS a conspiracy or secretive or spy-vs-spy tricky-dickey strategy. A lot of it is simply stuff that happens, for any number of various logical and knowable reasons, and then all the players get to react to it in their various ways.

The idea that Dickey Cheney popped last summer’s oil price bubble to pay back the Russians for invading Georgia is ludicrous in the extreme.

Of course, Dickey could be a secret member of the Pentavlet, I suppose. Does anyone know, has Dickey ever been to Colorado and The Meadows????