US Treasury Secretary Bessent highlights strong foreign demand for US assets

Scott Bessent walked into the House Financial Services Committee on September 15 with a simple message: the rest of the world wants to own American assets, and the receipts back him up. The US Treasury Secretary told lawmakers that recent Treasury auctions ranked among the two most successful in the past two decades, a data point he framed as proof that global confidence in US financial stability isn’t just holding steady. It’s accelerating. The numbers behind the confidence pitch Foreign holdings of US Treasuries now sit at roughly $9.3 trillion, representing about 30-32% of all publicly held debt. That’s a staggering pile of IOUs that the rest of the world is apparently happy to keep adding to, even as the national debt itself crossed the $40 trillion threshold earlier this year. But the bond market is only part of the story. Bessent highlighted that foreign investors have been pouring into US equities at an average rate of 2.8% of GDP through June 2026. For context, foreign inflows into Treasuries ran at about 2% over the same period. Stocks outpacing bonds in terms of foreign demand, outside of a crisis, is something that hasn’t happened consistently in decades. The 10-year Tre...