Financial Cavalry: Banque de France Owns Nearly 20% of Public Debt

For a long time (from the ‘90s to the mid-2010s) two-thirds of France’s public debt was held by “non-residents” – i.e. foreign investors – which represented a risk in case of mistrust (possibility of massive sales or crises). But things are starting to change: In 2014, 63.9% of the public debt ¹ was held by those non-residents; in 2017, this number has dropped to 55.5%. And the slack hasn’t been picked up by the French banks and insurance companies. As a matter of fact, their debt holdings are also diminishing slightly. So where is all that debt now? Simple: with Banque de France. How did this happen? As we know, the European Central Bank launched a QE plan in 2015 consisting in monthly purchases of 80 billion euro worth of sovereign bonds (from now on down to 30 billion euro). But this policy is concretely implemented by national central banks, at 80%, and by the ECB, at 20%. Surprised? Well, not really because, as we’ve discussed in our preceding article about Target2,...

from GoldBroker.com https://www.goldbroker.com/news/financial-cavalry-banque-de-france-owns-nearly-20-of-public-debt-1285