The Largest Customer Financing program in history?

Big technology companies in the US - such as Cisco, Dell, IBM are known for their huge customer financing programs. In fact during the last tech boom, some of these companies were alleged to prop up their revenues by financing "not so healthy" customers (call them the "subprime" customers - sorry couldn't avoid using subprime these days). As some of you might remember, the whole thing backfired during the subsequent recession as these customer defaulted resulting in big write-downs by these tech giants. History surely repeats itself especially if it is cleverly conceived financing trick that adds no value. Anyway getting back to the point that I am trying to make.

Do you know what is the largest customer financing program in place today? No points for guessing if you have been following the US-China trade imbalance issue. Yes, it is the China financing of the US. By investing its more than $1 trillion foreign exchange reserves in US Dollars China is effectively financing the US economy. The Chinese purchase of the US treasury bills is one of the reasons US is able to keep its interest rate so low and provide cheap credit to its population to continue to buy Chinese goods.

Now we all know how disastrously the last customer financing boom ended. Is something similar going to happen? If it does what will it mean - higher interest rates, higher inflation in the US, increasing foreign ownership of US assets etc or all of the above? In any case, doesn't look that rosy to me!!