Yesterday the announcement that the US Fed was easing US dollar borrowing sent stock markets soaring and Euro governments selling many bonds. This provides the intro to today's issue: buyers at an auction attempting to go incognito. An article from Reuters details a major version of this, in which the US Treasury discovered that China was buying Treasury bonds at auction anonymously, using third parties - something that is, in principle, against Treasury rules. The first question this raises is: why did the Chinese government bother? What is the advantage to keeping purchases of these bonds secret? And why was the US so eager to avoid 'ruffling' Chinese feathers in deciding how to react to their discovery?
