The Fed dipped into the coffee fund to increase its own MBS holdings by an insignificant $0.048 billion and treasuries came roaring back after last week’s anomalous sell-off. This week’s Reuters report1 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 number surged up $15.188 billion. That’s almost half-again as big as last weeks significant dump.
The Agency Debt figure rose a respectable $3.850. What’s weird is that number is now less than a billion dollars different from when the recent steady sell-off ended 10 weeks ago. Looks like we may be in another era where some force just doesn’t want the red line to move very much.
This week the total US obligations number for the cenbanks streaked up $19.038 billion (or $19.039, Doom was lazy and added the subtotals; we figure Reuters did it properly by going back to last week’s reported total). That’s almost precisely twice the down-figure from last week.
Twist’s ratios graphs started modestly down again.
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Agencies in the Setser 52-week chart converged strongly, but the treasuries line rebounded back up a bit on this week’s above-average buy.
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Notes and References
[1]: "Foreign central bank US debt holdings rose-Fed", by Ellen Freilich, Reuters, December 3, 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.
[...] "B" is twist's weekly treasuries bar chart from Doom's December 4th H.4.1 post, which clearly shows that the foreign central banks were taking up the stuff about twice as [...]