I did my rant on Wednesday already, and even the Puplava number shows just a modest $8.539 billion rise in the Fed’s little hoard of MBS, so let’s cut right to the chase, such as it is. This week’s Reuters report¹ was positively dull after last week’s historic treasuries buy. The report was, as usual, based on the weekly update from the NY Fed’s H.4.1 table site.² Here is Doom’s updated CSV version³ of the agencies and treasuries foreign central bank holdings data set.

The treasuries buy sagged back to $4.549 billion, about an 85 percent reduction from last week’s number, which was our 2nd highest ever.

Agencies fell by $1.483 billion, but that was less than a third of last week’s selloff.

The net buy of US obligations was a paltry $3.066 billion. Except for last week’s outstanding result, foreign official buyers haven’t been very busy lately.

Twist’s ratios graphs are still trending down, but at a much reduced angle from last week.

Setser’s 52-week change graph converged a bit this week on anniversary results heading in the same direction as this week’s but about 3 times stonger for both numbers.

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Notes and References

[1]: "Foreign c.banks’ US Treasury holdings up in wk – Fed", by Burton Frierson, Reuters, September 24, 2009.

[2]: "H.4.1 Factors Affecting Reserve Balances", Federal Reserve Statistical Release (weekly), Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

[3]: The updated data set as a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file is here.

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