https://www.reuters.com/business/swedish-pension-fund-alecta...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/danish-pension-fund-treasuries-...
(And remember that India and China combined reduced their holdings of US treasures by at least $50B in 2025: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/amid-global-... )
Canadian tourism visits to the US have dropped massively in the last year, not because Canadian tourist spots are better or more fun now (e.g. pure market forces), but again because of politics:
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20251211-where-are-all-th...
Denmark has been exiting foreign bonds for 10 years, down from a high of $24b in 2016 to $10b in 2025. It’s not only part of a trend, but the cited $100m of bonds sold makes up a negligible 0.00026% of US treasuries.
On that note, 1 USD buys nearly $1.40 CAD.
Politics makes it easy to write stories that paint an incomplete or incorrect picture.
https://www.thestandard.com.hk/wealth-and-investment/article...
But most of the world is in the same boat of "large budget deficits and growing government debt". It will be "interesting" for bond issuers and most investors and "exciting fishing" for hedge fund sharks over the next 10 years or so.
That said, I do not agree that it is 100% politicians. At least in the US, that path has been virtually unavoidable after the fiscal spending by G.W. Bush on the 9/11 wars and fully set in stone after 2008 subprime crisis. For the last 15+ years politicians could slow down or speed up the transit a little, but getting off that train has not been an option. My 2c.
It is growing by $1 trillion roughly every 82 days.
This debt level, which has exceeded 120% of the U.S. GDP,
Circling back to AI, my (not politically motivated) opinion, is that most of the tremendous supposed value was priced in into AI stock back in 2024, with 2025 gains being either relatively modest or stagnant. With the risks involved, I think it's fair to expect that AI companies can go down a lot, but it's hard to imagine them going up by that much.
Like, for example if NVIDIA gained another $1T in market cap, that'd increase the stock price by 22%, but if they lost that much, it would make it go down by 36%. If we consider both outcomes equally likely (not suggesting this is a reasonable assumption), we're more likely to lose money.
Which doesn't mean it wasn't the reason.
Right before Trump (2024), 1.42 CAD at the top. During Trump, barely hits 1.40 CAD, one time it touched 1.37 CAD.
Maybe. But they're allowed to avoid junk bonds and other "risky investments".
https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/.DXY?qsearchterm=dollar%20index
The big move down happened March-June.
This could be attractive depending on your view of the future of the US dollar and US stock market.
As soon as Trump came in power I sold all my dollars and I was wise to do it.
Expect things to go much more worse from here, this is only the beginning.
You don't need to introduce capital controls to make it unattractive to invest in the US. There are plenty of options that the EU could pull that would make investments abroad very unpopular quickly.
And that ignores the fact that states like Poland, Ireland, and Czechia would ferociously fight back at anything that threatens their FDI driven economies.
Even Ireland opposed the Anti-Coercion Instrument [0] four days ago, and everyone remembers Belgium's unilateral opposition to freezing Russian assets barely a couple weeks ago.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/be-no-doubt-eu-will-ret...
Picking up pennies in front of a steam roller and counterparty risk seem to be perennial favorites of youth, but I hazard to guess only a minority in the market have flesh yet untouched by fire.
Macron is still talking nonsense of course. The Euros never left in the first place.
Does that mean trade imbalances don’t exist?
I doubt it will make any difference though, because Trump is about as brain damaged as they come.
So is Trump. This is all just response to bullying.
"I got big muscles"
"Oh yeah, I got big muscles too"
This all is happening because America elected a criminal clown, twice.
I know we all want it to be some shadowy cabal so we can pretend the average person didn't cause this, but it isn't. We did this to ourselves.
Overall they're running a deficit at 5.8% of their GDP. And they of course missed their target of 5.4% (which is already gigantic) in 2025.
Public spending represents 60% of the GDP.
In other words: France is totally fucked, merde!
The only reason the IMF hasn't taken the reins of France yet is because France has the nuclear weapon and is the only country in the eurozone to have it, so they have some leverage with the other countries in the eurozone.
So Macron would be wise to concentrate on fixing the insane public spendings of France which brings nothing else but debt, misery, and third-worldness to France.
First of all IMF has nothing to do with the Eurozone. And second of all, we are Europeans. We don’t threaten to bomb our neighbors if they don’t give us what we want. That’s just a Russian/American thing.
Healthcare is almost entirely public in France (pension also mostly are), so I'm not sure that your comparison makes sense.
* https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/... * https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
France certainly has a higher % of expenditure to GDP than other comparable countries, and you would expect the USA health care to GDP % to decline to be more inline with other countries with universal coverage if a national program was introduced.
However, because France is still offering more public social services and benefits overall vs. a "USA + universal health" that it's hard to make broad claims either way about who is wasting more money or which system is more effective for citizens based purely on % of government expenditure to total GDP.
This is one of the biggest reasons why it is trivially easy for USA, China, and Russia to squeeze them (and the whole EU) from all sides.
At the end of the day, that just isn't sustainable politically and it's pretty questionable if it's morally correct either
Haha, what? How is France having nuclear weapons leverage over other countries in the Eurozone? What kind of thing do you think the Eurozone or EU even is? We don't use threats of violence against each other in negotiations. France having nuclear weapons or not matters zilch in these conversations, because we're all allies.
Greece says hello!
Yeah, that tracks, re-reading with that interpretation makes it make a whole lot more sense than what I understood at first reading. Thanks a lot for helping me understanding it better!
If there's one thing a bank is scared of, it's getting nuked. /s
Guessing that's somehow counting enforced deductions off paycheques. Would be a wild difference if not.
https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/personal-savings
From that Draghi paper a year ago or so, I believe part of Europe's innovation problem seems to stem from a lack of private investment by individuals in this way, so that would also align with this different philosophy on dealing with savings.
Also, if the US person pays less taxes, but has to pay for a bunch of services that the EU person would get for free, that means the US person has a lower savings rate, even though they're paying for the exact same stuff.
Bulgaria was switching to Euro on the new year’s eve and the easiest way to convert Leva to Euro was to put the money into the bank, so Bulgarians deposited 100B+ levas into personal accounts by November which converts to ~50B+ Euros. Which is over 10K Euros per Bulgarian adult. Not bad for the poorest country, considering that home ownership rate is also very high(%86 IIRC).
The life is pretty good for a GDP per capita of $18K.
By the mid January %58 of the leva were removed from circulation BTW.
3.50% in the US sounds extremely low to me. It has fallen a bit recently but the savings rate was about 25% in France in 2020. Common knowledge says to strive to save at the very least 10% of one's revenue around here.
1: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
I think that "the net adjustment for change in pension entitlements" is there to take into account the expected reduced future income from pension entitlements dwindling over time (edit: in effect, making pensions count as negative savings) somehow, but it's unclear.
I looked for another perspective but the French national bank doesn't mention pensions in its explanations[0].
[0] https://www.banque-france.fr/system/files/2024-08/epargne-de...
I have about seven of the buggers and I'm only in my mid 30s.....
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/13/economy/job-prices-debt-e...
I wonder how much of EU savings is invested in foreign countries?
That only works if there are takers for US bonds otherwise all this will do is devalue the USD.
Last but not least, that of quality and chemicals doesn’t hold anyway, as there are already loads of products coming from those countries already… I look always where things come from, and fruits come up to 80% from SA. Dang even apples from Argentina in Germany, which is frankly non sense to me! It’s just not about quality, is good all protectionism and imposing tariffs, just as Trump is doing, but if we do, is ok.
> Savings and investments union
https://finance.ec.europa.eu/regulation-and-supervision/savi...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-emman...
Open YCombinator Paris or London: Capital would flow to him.
Right, because it's not like France already has a large primary deficit or anything.