Where are you getting those figures? The TOTAL foreign held treasuries are around 10T (EU combined, without UK, has like 1,4T). US also does NOT owe repayment on demand. The COVID exceeded $4T without systemic collapse, although it made the market “feel” it. Theres no way to… financially nuke an economy, using bonds. You cant even sell them back to the US, youd have to sell them to China, Japan… other countries.
They can flood the open market with cheap bonds, meaning that when the US auctions off freshly minted bonds, they’re worth significantly less and therefore yields are significantly higher, which can lead to a death spiral of either: 1) the US has to continuously issue bonds at higher and higher yields just to pay off the previous round of bonds, 2) the Fed prints money to buy the bonds and the dollar collapses, or 3) the US just doesn’t pay, and then we’re basically back to 1 moving forward.
So yes, bond dumping can definitely fuck up the economy.
Where are you getting those figures? The TOTAL foreign held treasuries are around 10T (EU combined, without UK, has like 1,4T). US also does NOT owe repayment on demand. The COVID exceeded $4T without systemic collapse, although it made the market “feel” it. Theres no way to… financially nuke an economy, using bonds. You cant even sell them back to the US, youd have to sell them to China, Japan… other countries.
They can flood the open market with cheap bonds, meaning that when the US auctions off freshly minted bonds, they’re worth significantly less and therefore yields are significantly higher, which can lead to a death spiral of either: 1) the US has to continuously issue bonds at higher and higher yields just to pay off the previous round of bonds, 2) the Fed prints money to buy the bonds and the dollar collapses, or 3) the US just doesn’t pay, and then we’re basically back to 1 moving forward.
So yes, bond dumping can definitely fuck up the economy.