One thing I don't think most people know: the US balance of payments data basically shows China's reserve holdings pretty cleanly ...

(it thus captures the period when China diversified away from the dollar in a fairly obvious way)

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The basic data here is two lines in the bilateral BoP with China (portfolio debt and equity flows). With an adjustment for the "Belgian" holdings to improve the fit. That's all -- four lines of data.

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For a long time I feared the US data was missing a portion of the flow -- note the gap after the global financial crisis.

But with China's disclosure that it reduced its dollar share from ~ 80% to ~ 60% between 05 and 14, the gap makes sense ...

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Since 2014 the US data has caught most of the reserve flow -- nothing too interesting

the real question is whether the reserve flow is capturing all Chinese flows ... but that is for another time

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