Philippines ranks mid-pack in US asset exposure
Nearly half of the Philippines’ foreign portfolio assets are invested in the United States, according to a Nomura study.
It examined which countries could be most vulnerable if the world started to move away from the dollar.
Based on Nomura’s estimates, US portfolio assets accounted for 42.1 percent of the Philippines’ total foreign portfolio assets.
This marks the Philippines with the 15th-largest exposure among the 30 countries that the Japanese financial group is tracking.
About 39.9 percent of the Philippines’ total foreign portfolio assets are held in US debt securities as of September 2025.
The country joins Brazil and Peru, among a small group of economies where roughly a third or more of portfolio assets—including foreign reserves held by their central banks—are concentrated in US debt.
Meanwhile, the Philippines has a small exposure to American equities.
Should the so-called de-dollarization move gain traction, Nomura said, even a modest repatriation of US dollar assets could significantly push up the currencies of the most exposed countries.
That could weigh on their export sectors and squeeze households in remittance-dependent economies like the Philippines, possibly weakening domestic demand.
Nomura noted that some observers view the recent surge in gold prices as an early signal of de-dollarization.
Record-high reserves
Closer to home, the latest data from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas showed the Philippines’ gross international reserves climbed to a record $112.7 billion in February.
The value of the central bank’s gold holdings reached an all-time high of $23.1 billion—about 20 percent of the country’s buffer assets.
Nomura said seven of the 30 countries it sampled hold more than half of their total foreign portfolio assets in the US.
Canada stands at the extreme with 91 percent, followed by the United Kingdom, Israel, Mexico, Colombia, Australia and South Korea.
Another seven countries also have more than a third of their foreign portfolio assets invested in US equities. Canada leads with 65 percent, followed by Australia, the UK, South Korea, Israel, Norway and Sweden.
China, by contrast, has relatively limited exposure to US portfolio assets. It ranks 30th when measured against its total foreign portfolio assets, and outside the top 30 when scaled by its economic output.
“Overall, it remains highly uncertain if—let alone when—de-dollarization will gain traction,” Nomura said. “But it is a risk.”
