The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s U.S. Treasury Holdings
You can see from their reported figures that their U.S. treasury holdings are far too low for a sensible national portfolio. It&#x27;s a pretty glaring hole, and you know that the money is going somewhere off the balance sheets.<p>The question has always been how much U.S. debt exactly the Saudi&#x27;s hold. This is an interesting historical anecdote, but it doesn&#x27;t provide any information about the size of the debt, other than &quot;much larger&quot; than official figures, which isn&#x27;t terribly informative.<p>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.<p>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.<p>They really must want to keep those documents secret. There is no way that a country gobbling up it&#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.<p>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.<p>There must be some extremely senior officials involved in that report. Whoever they are, they&#x27;re senior enough that they can&#x27;t be made to disappear quietly into the night.<p>If those pages do contain information specifically identifying financiers of 9&#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&#x27;s right to know, that&#x27;s a very nightmarish scenario.