AFAICT:
* US federal debt held by Fed Reserve Banks: $5.6T
* US debt held by foreign and international investors: 7T
* Debt held by private private investors: 17T
See, which while having a "2018" URL, has an up-to-date embedded graph:
* https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/04/whos-buying-treasuri...
17+7+5.6=29.6. 5.6/29.6 = 19%.
> That number is increasing every year.
It was rising up to 2014, then held fairly steady between 2014 and 2018, and then started decreasing until the drama of 2020 kicked in:
Side-note: The Chinese have to own treasuries because the US buys so much stuff from them. If they hurt the US currency relative to their own, then Chinese goods would become more expensive for Americans, and the US would buy less. That would not be good for an economy like China's that has a trade surplus with the US in the range of hundreds of billions of dollars per year. [2]
[0] - https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-15/china-s-h...
[2] - https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/china-mongolia-taiwan/peo...
Our bonds are cheap because we can offload them onto the Fed.