WASHINGTON: Bloomberg reporting closed the loop today on Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir’s ridiculous claim that the country holds $750 billion in U.S. assets. In response to Bloomberg’s Freedom of Information Act request, the U.S. Treasury divulged Saudi holdings of U.S. securities as of last June. In addition to the granularity on Saudi’s Treasury holdings that I discussed in this column, the Treasury today disclosed Saudi holdings of other securities including stocks and asset-backed securities as of June 2015.
Saudi Arabia’s grand total of U.S. stock holdings as of last June: $52.4 billion. To put that number in perspective the New York Stock Exchange’s data show a dollar volume traded Monday of $56.2 billion. The NYSE’s market share of total U.S. trading on Monday was 17.76%, so the total dollar volume of stocks traded on U.S. stock exchanges Monday was $160.3 billion.
So, Saudi’s entire holdings of U.S. stocks represent less than a third of one day’s volume. That is a drop in the bucket, at best.
Treasury also disclosed that Saudi Arabia owned $10 billion in U.S. asset-backed securities as of June 2015. So, adding the stock holdings, the Treasury holdings and the ABS , Saudi’s total holding of U.S. securities amounts to just under $180 billion. That leaves a yawning chasm between real-world data and Al-Jubeir’s claim of $750 billion in Saudi assets in the U.S.
Saudi Arabia could could liquidate its entire holdings of U.S securities in a day, and few would notice. I would not trust anything Al-Jubeir says any more than I would trust his government to deliver basic human rights to its people, especially the female population. No securities liquidation could change the fact that 15 Saudi citizens were among the 19 hijackers that tried to liquidate two of America’s most important cities on September 11, 2001.
