But opaque foreign financial centers pile on Treasuries, often held by US companies and hedge funds.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET .

Treasury securities have lost their allure for foreign central banks and governments, whose holdings declined this year and in July dropped to $3.77 trillion at market value, roughly where they’d been in 2012, according to the Treasury Department’s TIC data.

But over this period, since 2012, the amount of Treasury securities outstanding has about tripled, according to the Dallas Fed market-value data (via St. Louis Fed). And inflation since 2012 was 48%.…