What this shows: the rolling 12-month sum of foreign net transactions in U.S. corporate stocks, in billions of dollars. Each point adds up the most recent twelve months of cross-border buys minus sells, so lumpy single-month prints (large block trades, index rebalances, one-off foreign official trades) are smoothed into a readable trend of foreign appetite for US equities. Positive = foreigners are net buyers over the trailing year; negative = net sellers.

Data: the Treasury International Capital (TIC) Custody and Safekeeping Liabilities (CSLT) survey — U.S. custodians, broker-dealers and banks report cross-border securities transactions for foreign official institutions and private investors. Net transactions are measured at market value and are not seasonally adjusted. The series is FRED FORLTEQTYNET99996 (U.S. Treasury TIC + Federal Reserve staff estimates), monthly from January 1985; the rolling sum starts in December 1985 once a full 12-month window exists. Recent months are preliminary and routinely revised.

Recession bands: NBER US business-cycle peak-to-trough dates, drawn as shaded vertical bands: Jul 1990–Mar 1991, Mar–Nov 2001, Dec 2007–Jun 2009 and Feb–Apr 2020. Foreign buying tends to hold up or even accelerate into US recessions — the 2008–09 and 2020 episodes both saw continued net foreign accumulation on a 12-month basis.

Reading the chart: the line is the trend; sharp vertical moves usually reflect one outsized month entering (or dropping out of) the 12-month window rather than a genuine regime shift. Zoom in (scroll / shift+drag) to isolate individual episodes.

Data: chart data (JSON) · source series (CSV) · FRED series page