US Debt holders - What is the UK doing???

Hi,

I just got a look at the US Debt holding broken down by country / month from this link http://www.treasury.gov/tic/mfh.txt .

One figure that leapt of the page was that the UK holding has increased from 76.1 billion in Nov 2006 to 315.6 billion just 1 year later.

I'm a total novice at fundamentals (and many other things) but can someone explain why the UK would want to hold an ever increasing amount of debt that (from my understanding) is steadily loosing its value?

I hope I'm missing something obvious. Perhaps I'm just seeing a snapshot of part of a larger cycle. Anyone?

Thanks

During the 1980's Japan was flush with cash. They didn't have a whole lot to do with it at home, so they started buying up America. It quickly gave rise to some serious jingoism which hit it's peak when they bought Rockefeller Center in New York City. You would have thought they had attacked us at Pearl Harbor again the way the media and people talked about it.

What wasn't in the media was that at the peak of their buying of real estate and companies, the British held at least 5 times as much, yet you never heard anyone screaming, "The British are coming, the British are coming!!!" That's because the British have always been here. They own more of America than anyone ever has. Even now with the Gulf Arabs sending their petrodollars to buy stuff in the US, it pales to what the Brits have accumulated over the last 350 years. Someday when the Arabs aren't having such sunny days, they'll sell their holdings just like the Japanese sold what they bought. But the Brits are the ultimate buy and hold folks when it comes to the US. So buying this debt isn't really such an odd thing when taken in the larger perspective.

It also illustrates another point though. The US foreign policy makers have traditionally been screw-ups. It's the result of too much in-breeding within the State Department. But American businessmen do just fine for themselves when it comes to wrenching a dollar from someone else's hand, regardless of their nationality.

OK, Thanks for that insight Dopey, I'm digging my way through the US Treasury website to find some historical data.

What you say sort of backs up what I suspected in that the figures that caught my eye were just a blip on the long term landscape.

Also, one of the foot-notes on an alternative doc says that if the debt is held by a foreign bank on behalf of a third party (of whatever nationality), it appears on the statement as being owned by that bank. Obviously there's room for error here.

That the UK owns most of America was the premise (conspiracy theory?) of a document I read a while back. It all started with the rail-roads apparently.

Cheers.

Rail roads and conspiracy theories, whatever next lol.