Imagine yourself buying a home for your family.  In order to afford the purchase of a home you go to a local bank or lender and obtain a mortgage.  Your mortgage sets forth your obligations to pay, how much, interest rates and what will happen if you don’t pay your mortgage and default on your agreement.  You are now living in your new home, making payments on time. You have a small business, go to work and do everything you can do to earn an income that will afford your family their needs and make that mortgage payment to your lender.  Now imagine if your lender were to begin to act adversely to you , even when you are on time with payments and not in default. What if they were to steal intellectual property you use to run your business and begin competing with you? What if they were to hack into your computers and cripple your networks?  What if they were to persuade your customers to stop doing business with you? Should you still be required to make that mortgage payment to your lender that is doing everything they can to limit your ability to make that payment? This would not be a legitimate Lender/Lendee relationship.

This is exactly what China is doing to the United States.  Currently China holds over $1.13 trillion dollars in US Treasury Securities, which means we have to pay that money back with interest.  If you exclude unfair trade practices and only account for their IP theft, hacking of US businesses and government computers, propping up North Korea and other adversarial regimes around the world; China is responsible for many billions of dollars in losses to the US government and businesses every year.

Solution..  Require the holder of all US Securities to be registered and ownership transfers to be registered.  Every treasury security has a unique identifying number. Every time China hacks, steals, or undermines our interests, we invalidate a punitive portion of their treasury holdings.  Part of this debt cancellation could even be used to make US business that were affected by China’s actions whole. When we start eliminating billions of dollars of our debt to China because of their actions, they should stop their activities.

I am not, nor do I pretend to be an expert on foreign relations or economics.  There could very well be other undisclosed reasons this solution would not work with China.  I am by nature a problem solver. When I see things that are wrong, I want to fix them. This article is simply an attempt to have a voice and propose a solution.  We must always think outside of the box and never let the status quo, or the difficulty of the problem prevent us from trying.

Source for China’s Treasury Holdings