Europe could 'weaponize' $10T of US assets over Greenland
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Meanwhile, the bond holders that don’t sell, can wait it out until the bond pays out or the selling mania stops, and the price returns to equilibrium.
We get nothing done in the EU because we are all prisoners to 27 different voting populations, and nothing moves forward if even one of them opposes it
Evidence of that:
> Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries
However the amount of US treasuries Denmark holds but privately and publicly did decrease by 20% or so over the last yea which I guess is something..
I believe that you might be a fellow European. If you happen to have 30 minutes to listen, I would love to hear your feedback.
As a foreign-domiciled holder of US assets, my vibe is that losing the rule of law would indirectly lead to significantly more financial suffering.
How well did bond-holders fare, getting out of the last Lebensraum era?
The only viable way to do this would be for the EU to fully switch out of USA/USD into China/BRICS but Russia won't allow it and who is going to buy EU's exports? Not China.
But that analysis of viable options is for rational and competent leadership, so who knows.
TO solve
> need the swap lines by the Fed to stay afloat
?
This is about as nonsensical as it gets.
A huge amount of EU imports (from outside Europe) have to be paid in USD. Like oil/natgas/commodities and manufactured stuff.
The Euro is not really used as reserve currency outside of EU.
So if EU goes into economic war with USA by dumping US treasuries: 1. they would be trading those treasuries for something else (EUR denominated bonds? yuan? something else?); 2. no more swap lines and goodbye exports to USA so USD debt trap with depositors (forced conversion to EUR?); 3. How are they going to pay imports without USD lines?
The only other big player who can give them equivalent liquidity in swap lines is China. But as I stated, that would be even worse than USD dependency and less likely.
All this while the EU industrial base is on the brink and with a huge dependency on American natgas and Chinese supply chain. They cornered themselves and they can't do much without huge sacrifices. The only way out needs a complete shakeup of the leadership in Brussels and a new economic plan. I wouldn't bet on that happening.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurodollar
[2] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/financial-stability-publicat...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
In Yuan? Which is certainly a more of a global reserve currency than the Euro and is certainly widely used for international trade? The same Yuan with the massive amount of liquidity outside of China?
The Canadian Dollar and Pound Sterling each are a have a significantly bigger share as reserve currencies than the Yuan....
USD/CNY havs only slightly higher volume than USD/CHF. Hardly anyone uses it anywhere outside China.
Canada is still the top 5 holder of US bounds..
Trump's policies seem to be aimed at devaluing USD and harming the US and its allies.
I guess maybe this pressures the other powers that be in the US that don't take the threat seriously to do more to stop him?
There are some, but not as many as you imagine.
oh that isn't possible to organize No with that attitude
authorities will brutalize the protestors freedom isn't free
Americans are too comfortable/lazy to do mass political protest Well we'll see whether that's true I guess.
what if this leads to civil war If the alternative is corruption and tyranny, maybe that's a fight worth having. Authoritarian governments do not historically reach a point where they say 'well that's enough tyranny, let's not get carried away lest history think ill of us.'
I have an American friend who keeps complaining about Trump. There was a protest in his city, but he didn't go because he had a BBQ to attend that weekend.
Seriously, this isn't fun anymore and Americans should be extremely concerned and start acting one way or another. It may be symbolic but it's better than nothing, if only for peace of mind.
I don't have any friends who don't vote, really, and the midterms might not come soon enough to do anything here.
My senator had a head injury and reversed all his opinions for some reason, so I've called his office a lot but he's very pro Invading Greenland now, and pro criminalizing his voters. Unhelpful guy.
I would start preparing for all of this to happen, and tell your friend to get his passport up to date.
Representatives can draft articles of impeached for the President.
Senators can start impeaching various Secretaries like Defence ("War") and Homeland Security. Or all of the Secretaries really, since they're not upholding the Constitution themselves by not invoking the 25A to get rid of a mentally unstable President.
Where are all these much-vaunted "checks and balances" that I've been hearing about for so long?
That's the problem, turns out there are none.
Or to be more precise, they do exist but they rely solely on each arm of the government acting in good faith and respecting the boundaries of their power and deferring on powers that belong to a different arm of the government.
But turns out there was a 0-day bug in the constitution: if the president simply completely ignores all other branches of government, nothing can be done about it.
The much vaunted checks and balances rely on Congress and the supreme Court checking the executives power. Since the presidents party controls both, this doesn't happen. The Imperial Presidency has been absorbing power from the other branches since the 90s, and we are pretty close to the end of that process right now.
70s, at the latest. 30s, realistically and bipartisanly speaking.
:(
Trump has been impeached twice. Even if you could get enough Republicans in the House on board to do so a third time (the GOP holds a majority in both houses of Congress), the threshold of 2/3 of the Senate to convict and remove is far out of reach; there aren't enough Republicans that aren't die-hard Trump loyalists (there are rumors that an actual armed invasion of Greenland might change that, but those kind of rumors of opposition often turn out to be overblown when situations materialize, with a decisive number Republicans offering some criticism and then finding an excuse to oppose actual action.)
> Senators can start impeaching various Secretaries
No, Senators cannot start impeachment, which regardless of which officers subject to it are targeted must start in the House. And the same problems which face impeachment of the President apply here.
> Where are all these much-vaunted "checks and balances" that I've been hearing about for so long?
They rely on the same malign faction not controlling both political branches as well as dominating the Supreme Court at the same time. Unfortunately...
Trump learned during his first term that he can bypass checks and balances by making sure the GOP is thoroughly MAGA. People who stood up to Trump have been sidelined, such as Justin Amash, Mitt Romney, and, most famously, Mike Pence, who stood up to Trump on January 6 and paid a heavy political price for it. That’s why Vance, not Pence, is the current VP.
Have protests ever stopped the creation of a dictatorship, in history?
> build momentum until this can't be ignored?
Your answer to "how do we stop this" is "do something until it stops."
> perhaps write to congressmen?
"Dear official who actively supports subverting our democracy: Please don't."
> attend townhall meetings and ask questions to your representatives?
Filed under "Rearrange the desk chairs."
> try to raise awareness to your friends who don't vote?
This (alone) would have the ability to change things... but at this point, they are hiding that shameful fact. Non-voters and supporters of third parties in the US are effectively supporting the status quo.
You didn't suggest this, but I already employee a spicy bumpersticker that complains about Trump, and give stern looks to the screen when the news reports on abuses of law.
That is, in part, a major aspect of resistance, yes. Protests on the weekends are great for community engagement and visibility, but constant pressure and activism are necessary. I think Minneapolis is a great example of how people should react when the situation gets bad. But even before that, getting involved in local organizations so that you're ready to help your neighbors is huge. For those of us not in Minneapolis, a general strikes would be great.
They have in my country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_2009_Moldovan_parliament...
And in Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan
And in many other places.
They do have the ability to change the course of actions. But even if it's just symbolic, massive protests would show the world that Americans aren't all in favor of the regime in place and some have a functioning morale compass.
It sends a message to the less active people who might turn off news that somethings is ain't right. Next time they might even vote.
Of course, the challenge is convincing the electorate in red states that Trump’s antics regarding Greenland are catastrophic enough to warrant his removal, given the stranglehold MAGA has on the Republican electorate.
Protests. Riots. Strikes.
Y'know, the sort of thing that toppled Yanukovych in Ukraine, lotsa Middle Eastern dictators during the Arab Spring, British rule in India, Soviet control over the Baltics, etc etc etc.
Your politicians are use- and spineless. It's time for your people to step up.
Plus, I just saw a little segment on Fox News where it was portraying this whole Greenland deal as a way to "help Greenlanders boost their economy, each person will get X cash, blah blah". So anyone only watching Fox is probably convinced we're doing Greenland a favor, liberating them from Danish oppression, just like we recently liberated Venezuela from oppression (in case you didn't know!).
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
For the sake of the country, I hope that this is finally the red line that will get enough Republicans representatives to finally have the courage to rein in Trump, at least on this issue.
I’m a Californian. It’s one thing for me to write Alex Padilla or Adam Schiff; they’d vote to convict if they have the chance. But they won’t get a chance unless people like Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham say “enough is enough,” but I don’t live in those states.
That abdication has lasted decades and led to what is essentially a cascading failure across multiple levels and wings of government.
The average person isn't going to be out protesting on the streets until something starts to direly impact them. Life is filled with complications and worries enough that human's just choose to allocate their capacity for worry to more immediate issues.
(I'm not American and don't live in the US)
But the reality is that he still has significant public support, from a public who get most of their current events from filtered, biased news media. In that way, we've actually become remarkably similar to Russia under Putin.
Honestly, this looks very much like 1930s Germany. I really wish that weren't an exaggeration.
Republican ID is at around 27% of the electorate and on a downward trend; his support from independents who are much larger than either Dems or Reps is much less.
There isn't a lot of unbiased media, in any political direction. Danish media is no different.
Right, I agree. Just offering the information since I had to look it up.
The myth of the American Dream (reinforced by the prosperity gospel and fused with the modern conservative movement) has turned greed and hierarchy into “virtues.”
What’s strange is that the people selling it (Trump, Musk, etc.) come across as profoundly miserable.
You have to know how to trigger it, cause Trump knows it extremely well. Studies have shown for a long time the human brain is often wired to prioritize group loyalty over factual accuracy.
Prior to Trump, most white americans only encountered this if they brought a black girlfriend home.
If you think the average American has any real control over what comes out of the White House these days, I have some ocean-front property in Kansas City to sell you.
I did my part, but I have 70 million compatriots that are just all too willing to allow the earth scorching as long as it means they don't have to see another black little mermaid.
Now when we've both shaken off our much pent in sarcasm, what would you say to them?
ICE has recruited a lot of those people - you don't see as many weird paramilitary militia groups as you did back in 2020. So I guess it technically worked as intended here. Unfortunately that means more jackboots with "don't tread on me" flags on their unmarked vans.
Americans don't care because they don't have to. In Germany, 40-45% of GDP is exports: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?location.... In the U.S., it's just 10-11%: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?location.... Exports to the EU are just over 1% of GDP. To put that into perspective, if exports evaporated completely, that would wipe out just three years of American GDP-per-capita growth. For Germany, it would wipe out more than two decades of GDP per capita growth.
That not only means that 90% of America's economy is domestic. It means that most people have no exposure to the rest of the world through their workplaces. To the extent they do, that experience is with Canada and Mexico--we have twice as much trade with those countries as with the EU. Canada and Mexico have essentially zero meaningful leverage over the U.S. So even for the relatively few Americans who have some exposure to the rest of the world, most of their exposure is to relationships where America is the utterly dominant party.
The contrast is even more stark than those numbers suggest because while the US is basically self-sufficient in petroleum these days, it imports and exports a lot of crude because US refineries are good at refining heavy crude and sour crude, which other countries struggle to refine. The crude produced in the US is the easy-to-refine non-heavy non-sour stuff so it exports some of that and imports an approximately equal amount of difficult-to-refine stuff because that way US refineries can take advantage of their comparative expertise to make a little money.
The point is that it would be easy for US refineries to switch entirely to US-produced crude as their supply, and if they did that, that 10-11% figure would go down a lot.
The reason people tend to think that international trade is important to the US economy is that during the Cold War, Washington used the ability to trade with the US as a carrot to tempt countries into allying with the US against the USSR. But the main motivation for the US to do that was not to enrich Americans but rather to increase the (long-term) military security of Americans.
They don’t view anything that is going on as incorrect or “the wrong direction”.
A good discussion on the topic is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jooEsmOOm2k tl;dw - authoritarianism and conservatism directly impact your cognition and ability to reason about the world and prefer abductive reasoning and avoiding new information.
"Republicans don’t want to hear this, but there’s a pretty long-standing body of social science research that indicates people who have right-wing attitudes, particularly regarding religion and epistemology, appear to have lower cognitive capacity." (and it gets worse with age because you do not receive new information)
Which, leads us to simply morals and ethics. Two sides with two different views who both are angry at the other for not having their views.
That’s not to say both are right, but there’s surely one side that has a lot more care for us all as humans vs thee.
At this point I assume they just have it on macros like the old MUD days. And to extend the analogy, they're playing as low-wisdom trolls.