I wanted to understand who owns the US debt, and I wanted a way of seeing it. The Bullion API already showed how big the debt is. It did not show who holds it. So I added a split of the debt held by the public into three groups: foreign and international investors, the Federal Reserve, and everyone else.
You can see it on the Holders tab. It has a sentence with the latest split, a share bar, a chart of each group over time and a quarterly table. The history covers about five years, which is what the first refresh backfilled.
Three things the split has to handle
"Everyone else" is my calculation
Nobody publishes an "everyone else" figure. I work it out as the debt held by the public minus the other two groups.
That only works when all three figures are published for the same quarter. For any other quarter the API has no "everyone else" figure.
The Federal Reserve figure arrives first
The Federal Reserve figure usually arrives a quarter before the foreign figure. If the page mixed the newest figure of each group, the three numbers would come from different quarters and would not add up to the debt held by the public.
So the split stays on the last quarter where all three figures are published. The page notes the newer Federal Reserve figure separately.
Foreign means where the holder is based
Foreign holdings are attributed to where the holder or its custodian is based. They are not attributed to whoever ultimately owns the debt. The foreign figure therefore tells you where the holdings sit, not whose money it is.
Calling it
GET /v1/government-debt-holders/us returns the quarterly history and GET /v1/government-debt-holders returns the latest values. Both use the same envelope as the other government-finance routes. Amounts are decimal strings in millions of US dollars. The same data is available to an AI assistant through the get_government_debt_holders tool in the MCP server.
Two foreign figures
The Bullion API now has two foreign totals for US debt, and they differ. The Holders tab shows about $9.36tn. The US Treasury holders pages show about $9.0tn at market value. The two are measured differently, so they should not match.
What it doesn't do yet
The history only goes back about five years. The split runs a quarter behind the newest Federal Reserve figure, because it waits for the foreign one. It can't tell you who ultimately owns the debt, because foreign holdings are attributed by where the holder or custodian is based.
