Another factor - there are probably a few billion people in Asia in rapidly growing economies who need a hedge against all their savings suddenly becoming worth

Another factor - there are probably a few billion people in Asia in rapidly growing economies who need a hedge against all their savings suddenly becoming worthless due to local instability. Suppose you are planning your future, and you think there's a small but real (1-5%) chance that sometime over the next decade your local currency will become devalued to zero. Suppose also that you're expecting significant future costs: elder care for your parents, rising costs of living, etc. In those situations, you're likely to have a very high savings rate, and will tolerate guaranteed returns that are near zero (because factoring in the risk of local returns might make them closer to negative double digits). I'm not a global economist, so I don't know how much this is driving things. But China as a 45% personal savings rate, India is in the 30s, compared to the 6-7% of the US, and anecdotally people have noted significant amounts of foreign investment in "safe" assets. Some of these areas have banks that offer double digit returns for investments, but only on paper - people were talking up the returns from Mongolian savings accounts a few years ago, but then the currency has eroded so quickly that 15-20% returns are actually negative.