How has foreign official demand for U.S. Treasuries changed since 2010, by country?

1. The 2010 inflection: how we got here

Foreign official holdings climbed from hundreds of billions in the 1990s to roughly $3 trillion by June 2010, a build driven largely by a handful of emerging markets running big current‑account surpluses that channeled savings into dollar reserves and Treasuries — most prominently China and Japan ^{[1] [2]}.

2. China: from accumulation to relative decline

China accumulated roughly $1.1 trillion of Treasuries between 1995 and 2010, and that accumulation materially suppressed U.S. yields by the end of that decade; since around the mid‑2010s China’s Treasury stock has fallen as a share of foreign holdings, with persistent declines continuing into the early 2020s so that China’s relative role in official holdings is noticeably smaller than it was a decade ago ^{[1] [4] [3]}.

3. Japan: still a top holder but shrinking share

Japan has remained one of the largest foreign holders of U.S. debt, but like China its holdings have declined in absolute or relative terms since 2010 as portfolio mixes changed and domestic forces absorbed more issuance, contributing to the broader decline in the foreign official share of Treasuries ^{[5] [3] [6]}.

4. Europe, U.K., and other advanced economies: partial offsets

As China and Japan trimmed, some advanced economies — including parts of the EU and the U.K. — increased purchases, offsetting declines and blunting what would otherwise have been a sharper drop in total foreign ownership; by the early 2020s these regions helped stabilize foreign demand even as the composition shifted toward private and regional buyers ^{[6] [3]}.

5. The rise of private and domestic buyers — and why it matters

Since 2010 the composition of demand has shifted away from foreign official holders toward domestic and private investors, who are more price‑sensitive; the Kansas City Fed and Treasury advisory materials both flag that this shift makes the market more susceptible to higher term premia and requires higher yields to clear larger supplies of issuance ^{[2] [7]}.

6. Recent shocks: 2020 pandemic and post‑2024 adjustments

The pandemic briefly depressed foreign ownership as some countries sold Treasuries for liquidity, then resumed buying by late 2020, but newer episodes — including accelerated official selling after the November 2024 U.S. elections — have shown how quickly official holdings can fall: one analysis reports about $78 billion of official sales between early November 2024 and January 2025, pushing foreign official dollar reserves custodied at the Fed below $2.87 trillion ^{[8] [3]}.

7. Numbers and scale today — caveats in attribution

Broad measures put foreign holdings of Treasuries in the $7½–$8 trillion range in 2023–2024 and show that foreign‑held share of publicly held federal debt has fallen from near half in the early 2010s to roughly the high‑20s/low‑30s percent by 2024, but country‑level figures (e.g., China ~$759 billion in 2023) can be noisy because custody and offshore accounts complicate direct attribution ^{[3] [5] [9]}.

8. Why the change happened — competing explanations

Explanations are multi‑factor: deliberate reserve rebalancing by central banks (e.g., diversifying away from dollar assets), a surge in U.S. supply after 2008 and 2020 that outpaced foreign buying, the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing and later tightening, and structural “safe‑asset” dynamics that altered term premia — all have been invoked in the literature and policy briefs ^{[1] [10] [7]}.

9. What to watch next

The two fault lines to monitor are country‑level official behavior (whether China, Japan or Gulf sovereigns step up or step back) and the composition of buyers at auctions (more price‑sensitive private buyers means higher yields are likelier if supply rises); data releases from the Treasury’s TIC tables and Fed custodial reports remain the best near‑real‑time signals, with the caveat that country attribution has measurement limits ^{[11] [7] [5]}.