Glimpse on impact of Chinese currency devaluation in August on US treasuries

The top five holders of US Treasuries reduced their holdings in September, including China and Japan.

China's scaled back holdings by USD12.5bn from August to a seven month low of trn.

Japan's holdings fell USD19.9bn to trn, the lowest since October 2013.

This is consistent with China's efforts to stabilize the CNY following the surprised devaluation in August.

This is also reflected in the drop in FX reserves in September of USD43.3bn but it posted a gain of USD11.4bn in October.

Separately, China's trust assets fell 1.6% q/q to CNY15.6trn in Q3 2015 vs +10.1% in Q2. This was the 1st decline in 5 years on QoQ basis since Q1 2010.

The trust sector is the largest component in shadow lending. The drop can be attributed to a few factors including,

• Growth slowing down
• Stock market volatility and reduced credit demand
• Increased risk controls
• Increased scrutiny from the regulators to clamp down on shadow lending as part of efforts to curtail overall credit growth.

For USD/CNY, it opened unchanged at 6.3834 this morning, but down gradually to 6.3776 vs yesterday's close. USD/CNH is also dropped lower by a similar magnitude to 6.4074.