<story><title>The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s U.S. Treasury Holdings</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untold-story-behind-saudi-arabia-s-41-year-u-s-debt-secret</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>s_q_b</author><text>You can see from their reported figures that their U.S. treasury holdings are far too low for a sensible national portfolio. It&amp;#x27;s a pretty glaring hole, and you know that the money is going somewhere off the balance sheets.&lt;p&gt;The question has always been how much U.S. debt exactly the Saudi&amp;#x27;s hold. This is an interesting historical anecdote, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t provide any information about the size of the debt, other than &amp;quot;much larger&amp;quot; than official figures, which isn&amp;#x27;t terribly informative.&lt;p&gt;At this point, Saudi Arabia needs the United States more than the United States needs Saudi Arabia. The OPEC cartel is broken, Saudi Arabia is running a massive deficit, both China and Europe have economies mired in the aftershocks of 2008 which cannot absorb the additional supply, and the United States is energy independent.&lt;p&gt;If the Saudis are even willing to suggest selling off their dollar-denominated debts, they must be either unfathomably arrogant or extremely desperate. My read is the latter.&lt;p&gt;They really must want to keep those documents secret. There is no way that a country gobbling up it&amp;#x27;s meager monetary reserves could afford the hit to the value of those assets as they unwound them, even if they sold them off very slowly and predictably.&lt;p&gt;Something potentially very bad for world security is in those documents. Something that would force us into confrontation with the Saudis. Something that could cause a run on the dollar.&lt;p&gt;There must be some extremely senior officials involved in that report. Whoever they are, they&amp;#x27;re senior enough that they can&amp;#x27;t be made to disappear quietly into the night.&lt;p&gt;If those pages do contain information specifically identifying financiers of 9&amp;#x2F;11, the United States might be war-weary, but you can bet that a massive majority of Americans would demand  their heads on pikes. As much as I support the public&amp;#x27;s right to know, that&amp;#x27;s a very nightmarish scenario.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonstokes</author><text>A few years ago I read a good book on the collapse of the USSR (can&amp;#x27;t remember the title, too lazy to go back and find it right now). One of the major factors that the author identified was glasnost (&amp;quot;transparency&amp;quot;), which I&amp;#x27;m old enough to remember being talked about on the news at the time.&lt;p&gt;Basically, his thesis was that it was the transparency, after a generation of buildup of really nasty official secrets, that ultimately brought down the communist regime. Once it was clear that everything people thought was probably happening was actually happening, and worse, the whole thing just disintegrated from the bottom up. The regime lost all legitimacy, and the death blow was basically self-inflicted since it was the regime itself that started to open up.&lt;p&gt;I often wonder about that in the US context. What if a lot of crazy stuff that many people suspect has gone on actually turns out to be true, or what if it&amp;#x27;s even worse than some of the tinfoil hatters think, and we suddenly start finding out about it all.&lt;p&gt;I figured it would be some type of Wikileaks or Snowden-type reveal that would do us in, if it happened. But we may actually do ourselves in with an American glasnost that, just like the Russian one of the 80&amp;#x27;s, is done by well-meaning people in our own government.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s U.S. Treasury Holdings</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untold-story-behind-saudi-arabia-s-41-year-u-s-debt-secret</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>s_q_b</author><text>You can see from their reported figures that their U.S. treasury holdings are far too low for a sensible national portfolio. It&amp;#x27;s a pretty glaring hole, and you know that the money is going somewhere off the balance sheets.&lt;p&gt;The question has always been how much U.S. debt exactly the Saudi&amp;#x27;s hold. This is an interesting historical anecdote, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t provide any information about the size of the debt, other than &amp;quot;much larger&amp;quot; than official figures, which isn&amp;#x27;t terribly informative.&lt;p&gt;At this point, Saudi Arabia needs the United States more than the United States needs Saudi Arabia. The OPEC cartel is broken, Saudi Arabia is running a massive deficit, both China and Europe have economies mired in the aftershocks of 2008 which cannot absorb the additional supply, and the United States is energy independent.&lt;p&gt;If the Saudis are even willing to suggest selling off their dollar-denominated debts, they must be either unfathomably arrogant or extremely desperate. My read is the latter.&lt;p&gt;They really must want to keep those documents secret. There is no way that a country gobbling up it&amp;#x27;s meager monetary reserves could afford the hit to the value of those assets as they unwound them, even if they sold them off very slowly and predictably.&lt;p&gt;Something potentially very bad for world security is in those documents. Something that would force us into confrontation with the Saudis. Something that could cause a run on the dollar.&lt;p&gt;There must be some extremely senior officials involved in that report. Whoever they are, they&amp;#x27;re senior enough that they can&amp;#x27;t be made to disappear quietly into the night.&lt;p&gt;If those pages do contain information specifically identifying financiers of 9&amp;#x2F;11, the United States might be war-weary, but you can bet that a massive majority of Americans would demand  their heads on pikes. As much as I support the public&amp;#x27;s right to know, that&amp;#x27;s a very nightmarish scenario.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Sophistifunk</author><text>I think it&amp;#x27;s much more likely that the result will be an un-deniable public insistence on the right to sue the royal family. And if the Sauds can be sued for 9&amp;#x2F;11, the US can be sued for all the drone strikes and the like.</text></comment>