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...
$8 trillion is about half the M3 of the Euro.
In fact there are only about 20 trillion dollars right now, there isn’t even enough liquidity to cash out.
Stocks generally survive currency devaluations, but treasuries do not. So I am not a fan of treasuries in this environment, but US stocks should be fairly resistant except for their dependency on the US economy, which could be disrupted in a currency devaluation.
Many of these securities do not have a secondary market that isn’t in the US. Push comes to shove the US can block a lot of these trades.
Over time, the US will need to find someone willing to buy new US debt as existing buyers and holders invest elsewhere.
For African raw materials, Chinese commodities and components, etc - like everybody else with lots of $$. If you're paying attention, that also means higher inflation in the US.
Thanks, GOP geniuses... of course the rich, of which the admin is full of, love inflation because it makes them richer. If you complain about something, they'd blame China and Maduro, mission accomplished!
Major investors have always had some level of international diversification and that will continue. But this recent EU move won't have any significant impact.
I didn't say anything about "investing" in any closed markets or target countries. This isn't complicated but I'm sensing some entrenched and overly optimistic preconceptions getting in the way.
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,
I really do wonder what's going to end up happening with the debt...I think we've crossed the point of no return, but I'm not sure. Interest on the debt now exceeds military spending, and US military spending is about 40% of all NATO defense spending.
I've thought about this since I was young, and was fascinated that no one thought it was going to become a problem. There was a nice moment in the late 90s where the US reduced debt, but that was a blip.
All the petrodollar stuff seems like they are trying to keep the dollar valuable while it hyperinflates AKA knock everyone else's value down while being the most valuable even if it is like $1 trillion to $1 today
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.
It'd be quiet easy if the EU governments actually wanted to do so - I'm not sure they actually do right now, however.
There are practical difficulties too. What is the investments are made through an off-shore subsidiary or by investing in a fund in the US? It might even encourage the latter (single trade to buy the fund instead of managing US investments) and mean management fees move to the US.
If they impose it on just US trades it might still be subject to the problems above and would be a very serious step and one investors will hate.
I think we might well end up with something like this and a return to more money going to national capital markets rather than global, but its not going to be an easy transition.
https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/.DXY?qsearchterm=dollar%20index
The big move down happened March-June.
Their goal is to make American blue collar manufacturing jobs viable again, and part of the plan is to make it cheaper for other countries to buy their goods.
It's not the first time the dollar has been intentionally devalued.
It's one of many stated reasons.
What the real reasons are is not really important IMO. But my money would be on something much more sinister and selfish
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. For now the FED has relatively been untouched, it's not going to stay pristine forever.
While it would be great if people of the US started to show some backbone and resist this fascist takeower, I'm quite pessimistic. What's going on makes me really sad.
OTOH it's not too late!! We have seen trends like this turned around before.
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.
The EU can barely get the Mercosur FTA out the door. How can it even attempt to make such a drastic change that would make FDI in the EU less attractive than equally large and equally onerous China?
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 still remembers Belgium's unilateral opposition to seizing frozen Russian assets barely a month ago.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/be-no-doubt-eu-will-ret...
It's just a question of political will
For example, Trump could impeached and removed from office, but that isn't happening. So what's the solution?
For instance, Meta has basically doubled in price from a few years back but their business is basically identical. Doesn't seem very efficient to me, at least.
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.
Maybe. But they're allowed to avoid junk bonds and other "risky investments".
Pension funds around these parts are big, we are often forced to pay into them. Years ago, I noticed they started advertising green funds. Would not be surprised to see options that exclude the US too.
If you look at Trumps polls across EU countries, it is heavily in the negative and a lot of us are wanting to put our money where our mouth is about it.
Not really. Most EU countries don’t even have noticeable state pension funds (and one of the biggest culprits is actually France). They just rely on younger people to support the pensions of the retired ones.
For comparison. France’s pension funds (total public and private) are 12% of their GDP. Total EU pension funds are also around 20% of total EU GDP. USA pension funds are 170% of their GDP!!!
Yes, we have a pays-as-you-go pension system in Denmark (sigh). But regulations were also changed a while back such that employees must pay into a pension scheme of their own. In our case, that's handled via your employer and there's a minimum contribution limit and often incentives to pay a higher level.
((not my area of expertise))
I doubt it will make any difference though, because Trump is about as brain damaged as they come.
Macron is still talking nonsense of course. The Euros never left in the first place.
Does that mean trade imbalances don’t exist?
That’s why “imbalances” never close.
If goods and services were exchanged for little models of the Eiffel Tower nobody would say there was an imbalance. Yet we do when we exchange for Euros.
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.
It's one thing to spend a deficit on something long-term useful, it's another thing to piss it away.
That's been going on for many presidents in a row, in no way unique to Trump. Bush and Obama take the cake.
>That coupled with the dollar losing 10% of its value in a year
Is this some new virtue signal on BlueSky? USD is still trading in its channel at above historic averages. This is like saying the US market is crashing because we had a -2.5% day on Tuesday. Look at DXY and zoom out. It's been flat since May.
>of course stocks are higher than before. Inflation and dollar losing value = winning!
Three consecutive years of solid double digit market growth that has outpaced inflation and dollar valuation. Tell me you know nothing about financial markets without telling me you know nothing about financial markets.
You were attributing your "knowledge worker 401(k)" growth to Trump though?
> Is this some new virtue signal on BlueSky?
No, I'm not on BlueSky or any social media. Is this a poor attempt at some Trumper "own"?
> USD is still trading in its channel at above historic averages.
Look at the chart after "liberation day" in April. It's been down since then and stayed there. Not a very good sign for his policies.
> Three consecutive years of solid double digit market growth that has outpaced inflation and dollar valuation
I agree, Biden did well with covid recovery. Not sure how electing Trump did much for us other than cause a market crash in April (and subsequent dip buying) and weaken the USD?
> Tell me you know nothing about financial markets
Oh, I know plenty and I'm actually bullish on stocks because there is so much free money going around. It would be stupid not to have your money in assets with such high inflation on the horizon. I just find it funny that you're touting bad policy as a win when his whole campaign was about "Biden's inflation" causing high prices and Republicans are supposedly for being fiscally responsible yet the OBBB goes against that.
You were attributing the "cutting taxes while keeping government spending high AND lowering interest rates" specifically to Trump though?
>No, I'm not on BlueSky or any social media.
Yet you suffer from the same brainrot.
>Is this a poor attempt at some Trumper "own"?
Is this a poor attempt at some pantifa "own"?
>Look at the chart after "liberation day" in April. It's been down since then and stayed there. Not a very good sign for his policies.
Yes, it is still trading in its channel at above historic averages. A regression to the mean, the same drop happened under Biden in 2022. Not a good sign for [Biden's] policies.
>Not sure how electing Trump did much for us other than cause a market crash in April (and subsequent dip buying) and weaken the USD?
Of course you're not sure because you're financially illiterate. We're hitting all time highs again.
>Oh, I know plenty and I'm actually bullish on stocks because there is so much free money going around.
ZIRP is over. You're bullish because the market is hitting ATH under Trump. I've been selling puts all year to gullible "investors" that thought, and still think, the market is going to crash, any time now, under Trump.
>It would be stupid not to have your money in assets with such high inflation on the horizon.
"Inflation is on the horizon!" they screamed for an entire year. Trump's first year of his second term CPI was 2.7%, lower than any Biden year.
>I just find it funny that you're touting bad policy as a win when his whole campaign was about "Biden's inflation" causing high prices and Republicans are supposedly for being fiscally responsible yet the OBBB goes against that.
People find things they don't understand funny, news at 11.
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.
Let me fix that for you. Billionaires conned working class into giving up everything for "low taxes". Working class suffered.
And then the same working class elected - get this - another billionaire conman - the same category that previously conned them.
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
Europe has been on a 30 year vacation, and it's starting to look like that vacation might need to end.
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.
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!
Greece says hello!
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
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 Bulgarian deposits reached 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.
Tons of folks also live with their parents into their 30s.
When people talk about EU home ownership, savings, etc. they often neglect to mention the skew of the Boomer class. It really sucks for young people.
By the mid January %58 of the leva were removed from circulation BTW.
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.
Which means it makes more financial sense to put the money into pensions accounts?
I think a big a part is that a lot of EU money is invested in the US instead, and I am looking forward for that to stop..
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...
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/13/economy/job-prices-debt-e...
> In 2023, 54 percent of adults said they had set aside money for three months of expenses in an emergency savings or “rainy day” fund—unchanged from 2022 but down from a high of 59 percent of adults in 2021.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2023-repor...
via
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/paycheck-to-paycheck-and-five-...
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.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/inter/date/2024/html/ecb.in2...
see also https://archive.md/xaiLU
"Europe’s AI ambitions are running into a markets plumbing problem
The region lacks the depth of long-dated investment capital needed to fund required energy infrastructure"
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.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-emman...
Whose right fist struck as if by chance;
Her husband, called M...on,
Said his eyesight was gone,
> Savings and investments union
https://finance.ec.europa.eu/regulation-and-supervision/savi...
It's hard to overstate how much a beating the EU's reputation took after the Mercosur fiasco.
Lula took a massive political risk to push the EU-Mercosur FTA despite the power behind the throne in Brazil being wooed/bribed by the Trump admin [0] and already on the fence about the EU-Mercosur FTA because they are Ag Barons that primarily trade with the US and China [1] AND during a hotly contested election year.
This only makes the EU look like a less attractive negotiating partner, and incentivizes countries to unilaterally negotiate with individual EU states instead of the EU as a whole, thus undermining the entire EU.
If the EU alienates China, the US, Russia, Brazil, India, ASEAN, Japan, Korea, etc who else is left?
That is the whole crux of Carney and Zelenskyy's speeches at Davos.
> US is still unable to get a free trade deal with mercosur
Instead, we get an REE extraction deal in Brazil [2], financial backing for our current Venezuela escapade [0], and a president exporting Hispanic American-style far right politics into EU member states like Spain [3] and Italy [4] where right-leaning South Americans have become a major political voting bloc.
The more isolated the EU becomes, the easier it is for countries to begin taking advantage of European nations on their terms.
Edit:
The EU is now unfreezing and ratifying the US-EU trade deal [5]
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-18/brazil-s-...
[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/d293237e-e39f-4f4c-89e7-4c52cf937...
[2] - https://www.ft.com/content/401a9e84-3034-4375-bf39-56b92500c...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/spains-far-right-vox-ho...
[4] - https://cebri.org/revista/en/artigo/172/javier-milei-and-the...
[5] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-22/eu-plans-...
Last but not least, that of quality standards 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 South America (including Mercosur). 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.
Yes, I agree with the standards, but has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with the agreement Mercosur/EU. The standard will be imposed for ANY product sold in the EU, doesn't matter where it comes from, as it should be.
To add to the absurdity, one of the thing we Europeans will be able to export more to SA is chemicals, including those which we forbid here because they damage health and environment...
Or people exporting meat I happen to know. Independent of all requirements for anything in the EU, that of course has to be met, they will ask for lots of things above and beyond. That is the reality of the market. If you want to play with such a big market, it won’t be easy.
I know a guy who had paprika plantation, wanted to sell to Germany. They asked conserved samples of the last 20 years to guarantee consistency. That is just not normal.
But there are always buyers for the cheapest products too.
It's this attitude that makes non-Europeans (especially those of us without European heritage) less sympathetic to European pleas of support, yet it's your politicians that try to sign a defense pacts with "third world countries" like India [0]
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/eu-proceed-security-defe...
Well, returning the food production while the population is starving would have been an even harder problem.
Also why is he wearing sunglasses?
The glasses are due to eye redness.
That’s it, right?
There’s a reason Europeans mostly invest in US stocks: they are much more profitable because the US doesn’t tax to death and regulates to death their own companies. Maybe France and the rest of the EU should try the same.
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.