First, Belgium entered the data in a strange way. Back during the days of a separate transactions data series, there were almost no direct purchases of U.S. bonds by Belgian entities. Treasuries that ended up in Belgium were all bought in other jurisdictions (London, Paris, sometimes Hong Kong) and then moved to a Belgian custodian. That mapped to the fact that China never appeared cleanly in the purchases data; many of its U.S. holdings also didn’t appear in the transactions data either.
