A magnitude 4.2 earthquake struck near Grand Coulee Dam, the largest U.S. hydropower facility, in northeastern Washington state on Tuesday, prompting an immediate inspection of the facility but leaving no visible damage, a spokeswoman said.

Operation of the Columbia River dam, which supplies electricity to 11 Western states, was not disrupted by the tremor, according to the spokeswoman, Lynne Brougher of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the agency that runs the dam.

The U.S. Geological Survey reported the quake was centered about 25 miles (40 km) north of the dam near the town of Nespelem in heart of the sprawling Coleville Indian Reservation, an area ravaged by a major wildfire in recent days.

Weak to light shaking was felt over a wide region, but there were no immediate reports of damage of injuries. Earthquakes of that magnitude are not uncommon in seismically active Washington state, but Tuesday's 4.2 tremor was the first to strike this close to the dam "in quite a while," Brougher said. "Oh, it got our attention. Everybody felt it," she said, adding that the trembling went on for roughly 30 seconds. She said it would take several hours for dam officials to complete their inspection of the mammoth facility. Grand Coulee stands 5-1/2 stories tall, is 500 feet (152 meters) thick at its base, and stretches nearly a mile (1.6 km)across the Columbia River to form Lake Roosevelt, which provides drinking water and irrigation supplies for communities and farms in the region. The dam includes three major hydroelectric power-generating plants and a pump-generating plant that average a combined 21 billion kilowatt hours of electrical output a year. It also controls stream flow for flood management, fish migration and recreation downstream.

The original dam structure was completed in 1941, with additions made in the 1960s and '70s. Source

On Tuesday evening, we asked what would happen if emerging markets joined China in dumping US Treasurys. For months we’ve documented the PBoC’s liquidation of its vast stack of US paper. Back in July for instance, we noted that China had dumped a record $143 billion in US Treasurys in three months via Belgium, leaving Goldman speechless for once. 

We followed all of this up this week by noting that thanks to the new FX regime (which, in theory anyway, should have required less intervention), China has likely sold somewhere on the order of $100 billion in US Treasurys in the past two weeks alone in open FX ops to steady the yuan. Put simply, as part of China's devaluation and subsequent attempts to contain said devaluation, China has been purging an epic amount of Treasurys. 

But even as the cat was out of the bag for Zero Hedge readers and even as, to mix colorful escape metaphors, the genie has been out of the bottle since mid-August for China which, thanks to a steadfast refusal to just float the yuan and be done with it, will have to continue selling USTs by the hundreds of billions, the world at large was slow to wake up to what China’s FX interventions actually implied until Wednesday when two things happened: i) Bloomberg, citing fixed income desks in New York, noted "substantial selling pressure" in long-term USTs emanating from somebody in the "Far East", and ii) Bill Gross asked, in a tweet, if China was selling Treasurys.

Sure enough, on Thursday we got confirmation of what we’ve been detailing exhaustively for months. Here’s Bloomberg:

China has cut its holdings of U.S. Treasuries this month to raise dollars needed to support the yuan in the wake of a shock devaluation two weeks ago, according to people familiar with the matter.

Channels for such transactions include China selling directly, as well as through agents in Belgium and Switzerland, said one of the people, who declined to be identified as the information isn’t public. China has communicated with U.S. authorities about the sales,said another person. They didn’t reveal the size of the disposals.

The latest available Treasury data and estimates by strategists suggest that China controls $1.48 trillion of U.S. government debt, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That includes about $200 billion held through Belgium, which Nomura Holdings Inc. says is home to Chinese custodial accounts.

The PBOC has sold at least $106 billion of reserve assets in the last two weeks, including Treasuries, according to an estimate from Societe Generale SA. The figure was based on the bank’s calculation of how much liquidity will be added to China’s financial system through Tuesday’s reduction of interest rates and lenders’ reserve-requirement ratios. The assumption is that the central bank aims to replenish the funds it drained when it bought yuan to stabilize the currency.

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