Since the U.S. dollar has a variable exchange rate, however, any sale by any nation holding huge U.S. debt or dollar reserves will trigger the adjustment of trade balance at the international level. The offloaded U.S. reserves by China will either end up with another nation or will return back to the U.S.
What Would Happen If China Called In Its Debt? China's position as the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt gives it some political leverage. It is responsible for lower interest rates and cheap consumer goods. If it called in its debt, U.S. interest rates and prices could rise, slowing U.S. economic growth.
Foreign holders of United States treasury debt
China held 1.05 trillion U.S. dollars in U.S. securities.
If China were to begin dumping US debt, this could trigger a sell-off in the bond market, sending US interest rates higher and potentially hurting economic growth. But a sudden sell-off could also cause the US dollar exchange to fall against the yuan, making Chinese exports more expensive.
For its part, China owned 191,000 acres worth $1.9 billion as of 2019. ... Indeed, there has been a tenfold expansion of Chinese ownership of farmland in the United States in less than a decade. Six states — Hawaii, Iowa, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Dakota and Oklahoma — currently ban foreign ownership of farmland.
Breaking Down Ownership of US Debt
China owns about $1.1 trillion in U.S. debt, or a bit more than the amount Japan owns. ... The Chinese yuan, like the currencies of many nations, is tied to the U.S. dollar.
Brunei is one of the countries with the lowest debt. It has a debt to GDP ratio of 2.46 percent among a population of 439,000 people, which makes it the world's country with the lowest debt. Brunei is a very small country located in southeast Asia.
At the end of 2020, China's foreign debt, including U.S. dollar debt, stood at roughly $2.4 trillion. Corporate debt is $27 trillion, while the country's total public debt exceeds 300 percent of GDP.
Foreign holdings
Including both private and public debt holders, the top three December 2020 national holders of American public debt are Japan ($1.2 trillion or 17.7%), China ($1.1 trillion or 15.2%), and the United Kingdom ($0.4 trillion or 6.2%).
As of December 2019, the nation with the highest debt-to-GDP ratio is Japan, with a ratio of 237%. In 1992, Japans's Nikkei (stock market) crashed.
TOKYO/BEIJING -- China's net worth reached $120 trillion in 2020 to overtake the U.S.'s $89 trillion as a red-hot real estate market drove up property value, according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute.
The federal net debt rose by $253.4 billion in 2020 to reach $942.5 billion or 42.7% of GDP, compared with 29.8% in 2019.
Their outstanding debt amounted to $8 trillion at the end of 2020, Goldman Sachs estimated, equivalent to around half of China's gross domestic product; last year they also replaced property developers as the biggest Chinese debt issuers offshore, with $31 billion of dollar bonds coming due in 2022.
China has more than $5 trillion in national debt which is more than 50 per cent of its GDP. Beijing's untamed borrowing is only adding to the problem as global debt has surged by $28 trillion. ... Whenever countries have accumulated so much debt it has always led to a financial crisis.
China is experiencing a slow-motion economic crisis that could undermine stability in the current regime and have serious negative consequences for the global economy. Despite the many warning signs, Western analysts and policy makers are optimistic that Xi Jinping is up to the task of managing the crisis.
In 2018 , the Center for Global Development found that Djibouti, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, the Maldives, Mongolia, Montenegro, Pakistan and Tajikistan – countries among the poorest in their respective regions — will owe more than half all their foreign debt to China.
Jerome Kerviel: The most indebted person in the world, owes $4.9 billion.
As of 2020, China's total government debt stands at approximately CN¥ 46 trillion (US$ 7.0 trillion), equivalent to about 45% of GDP. ... The three government-owned banks (China Development Bank, Agricultural Development Bank of China and Exim Bank of China) owe a further 29% of GDP.
By the start of 2020, Chinese owners controlled about 192,000 agricultural acres in the U.S., worth $1.9 billion, including land used for farming, ranching and forestry, according to the Agriculture Department.”
What happens if the U.S. defaults? If Congress doesn't suspend or raise the debt ceiling, the government would not be able to borrow additional funds to meet its obligations, including interest payments to bondholders. ... The dollar's value could collapse, and the U.S. economy would most likely sink back into recession.