Editor’s note: The following is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from professor Peter St. Onge.
Japan is on the verge of a fire sale of hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. debt that could crash Treasury markets already teetering on the edge.
Just another exciting day for de-dollarization as Japan’s collapse sends people scrounging the couch cushions for dollars to pawn.
The news comes from The Wall Street Journal, which reported that Japan’s state-owned Government Pension Investment Fund, which holds Social Security reserves of nearly every Japanese worker, is poised to sell down its $400 billion of U.S. dollar assets and direct the money to Japanese domestic bonds and equities to prop up Japan’s asset markets long enough to limp through the next crisis.
The numbers are big because Japan actually has a Social Security lockbox—unlike the U.S., where Congress has frittered away…
