Swedish Alecta has sold off an estimated $8B of US Treasury Bonds
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Today the yield is ~4.9.
Now, in 2026, how many institutions are "picking up pennies in front of steamrollers" ?
Bunch of dumb people running the room and no experts.
Among its many flaws, the Constitution should have had a "elections run by an objectively fair method to each citizen" caveat before giving states the right to run their own elections.
But that would have been pretty progressive for the late 18th century...
In my dream world, we'd put enforceable boundaries on how much gerrymandering is acceptable via statistically stable methods (e.g. efficiency gap calculations).
The easier solution would have been parliamentary-style proportional party list representation, but I'm not sure the fairness benefits outweigh the "not being able to vote for your individual" drawbacks.
Common please: Japan's rates have hovered around zero for about 30 years. Three decades. Japan has never been the model for yield curve and the theory they "abandoned" has been recently abandoned, after three decades.
“I don’t need to outrun the bear. I just need to outrun you. “
If you're trying to escape an expected upcoming crash you don't necessarily need to look for growth but instead stability. Precious metals are always popular but simply shifting a portion of your money into an index fund of a different stock exchange should help minimize your exposure to any catastrophic loss.
This is, of course, not financial advice.
The master turned to the disciple and said: "A better thing"
The disciple was enlightened.
EDIT: Oh damn it. The entirety of the comment was "Sovereign debt of a more politically stable nation state or other monetary union" at the time I replied. Ah well.
Also I don't see that EU as a whole is on a downward trajectory, there are a lot of areas that are super strong, one being the defence industry.
US on the other hand - who wants to invest in or trade with them when they treat the rest of the world (including close friends) as shit.
The problem is that US treasuries have a bunch of features that can’t be replicated because of the size of the US economy. The only choice that comes close is China whose bonds are too illiberal to trade the same (and China has no interest in liberalizing them).
"Plan the work and work the plan."
It’s entirely possible that the EU can overcome the political struggles that a true EU bond brings about (I’d love to see how a bond would work that both the Hungarian and Danish and French and Greek governments would back long term) but it seems just as likely that each country will hold bonds in lots of countries, probably in some similar relationship to their trade imbalance.
But this is not some unmitigated win for the EU, there is just as likely to be really inefficient and riskier outcomes for everybody as there is some karmic punishment for the States for allowing Trump to run amok.
The trade imbalance angle is exactly the one that I think they will pursue because that is the one that can be made to work numerically, but great care should be taken to ensure that Germany does not end up with a disproportional amount of power. In a way the EU being fragmented but forced to work together is the best recipe for a fair outcome though the larger entities will probably always have some minor advantage in such constructs.
Macron says €300B in EU savings sent to the US every year will be invested in EU - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722594 - January 2026
Macron says €300 billion in European savings flown to the US every year will be invested in Europe from now on. All 27 EU states agreed to establish the S&I Union, a step toward the full Capital Market Union - https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1qjtvtl/macron_says... - January 22nd, 2026
Savings and investments union - https://finance.ec.europa.eu/regulation-and-supervision/savi... - December 4th, 2025
We’ll see if the EU member countries can approve a framework for bonds that are closer to a treasury in its guarantees, I’m skeptical but it could happen, but they don’t exist right now.
> Also I don't see that EU as a whole is on a downward trajectory
That's an extremely contrarian take that you can't justify with EU defense did good for once in it's life. Maybe we'll see something from the EU but remember the USA and EU GDP were basically identical 10 years ago now the US is 50% bigger.
Seriously in 2008 the EU had a bigger GDP and now is a fraction of the USA and member nations have done basically nothing to fix the core issues that left them behind.
> US on the other hand - who wants to invest in or trade with them when they treat the rest of the world (including close friends) as shit.
Sadly it doesn't really matter about a "want" it's a need at this point unless people are going to cut off their arm and collapse their own economies they don't really get a choice.
Isn't US injecting a lot of loaned money into the economy in a rate that might not be sustainable long term? Their debt-to-GDP ratio is way higher than EUs?
Sort of definitionally, nothing in that list is going to be more politically stable than the US.
In the second link, the author gives slightly lower country risk premiums (0% vs 0.2%) to Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, and Switzerland. Setting aside the practicality of these recommendations (how much debt does Liechtenstein issue? or Germany, for that matter?): in a world where the US is unstable, it's hard to imagine Canada being risk-free.
Canada needs to pursue further armament (Carney is pursuing a doubling of its defense budget) and training in asymmetrical warfare.
1. As recently wargamed by the Canadian military.
Then I remembered the building works, and thought "If it happened, how would anyone even notice?"
How does it feel to bury your head in the sand so hard that you can't see what's happening around you?
There are probably two or three different commenting guidelines this runs afoul of: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The US can no longer be trusted based on the actions of this administration. Other countries are pragmatically and reasonably adjusting accordingly, very publicly. There are other options besides the US from an economic, trade, investment, and defense ally perspective. These are facts. Whether you believe them is a choice.
Europe is learning that a ‘deal’ with Trump doesn’t exist - https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/21/business/trump-davos-greenlan... - January 21st, 2026
That is such a naively simplistic view of how the world works it reads like it's straight from a Daily Mail or Fox News headline, which always say "Europe does X" - like, who is Europe? Are they in the room with us now?
"Europe is learning" should say - (some) European states are learning, and they are learning that you cannot negotiate with convicted criminals and fascists - they will betray you on a whim because they do not answer to anyone, not even themselves.
There's a reason proper countries have had 5+ constitutions and keep changing them.
They (we) are all under attack.
That's a crazily high confidence prediction. What is their track record? What did they predict 5 years ago and how did those predictions bear out?
Edit: whoops, CFR only gives Russia a 9/10 score, not the full 10/10 score of 50% default probability.
It's time to stop magical, wishful thinking about how you want the world to be, and deal with the world as it is.
In practice, he has the authority to do anything he wants. Who is going to stop him? You? His pets in Congress? JPow's private hit squad? Clarence Thomas?
The first rule of neo-America is that you're playing the Chairman's Game[1], and there are no more rules. Its counterparties should bargain with it accordingly.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_(card_game) [2]
[2] The Chairman's Game is a game invented in a university. Some say it was invented at Stanford, while others say it was invented at MIT. It was inspired by a formerly prominent, but now somewhat disgraced Chinese politician that was famous for coming up with a lot of interesting new rules for his subjects to follow, and enforcing those rules very harshly, without necessarily informing those subjects what those rules were. It's a little bit like Uno, a little bit like Crazy Eights, and the only thing that I can tell you about it is that there are times, when playing this game, when it is not a good idea to speak.
Yes, ultimately Clarence Thomas and his eight friends, or Congress.
If you're waiting for Republicans to save you from his madness, you'll be waiting for a long time.
>under this president and the one who replaces him in three years.
The levels of optimism in this sentence are off the charts. The US's political systems are so weak, fragile and compromised that you don't even know if you're going to hold proper midterms or if you're going to get a civil war, the current president is threatening the FED, but sure, debts are going to be paid when it's ran by the dude that managed to bankrupt casinos.
Add to that the rampant debt increase over many decades and zero political will to rectify the situation, which is why the rate of return is so much higher than in more politically stable countries such as for example Switzerland, Germany or Sweden.
2. The majority of his followers have some level of cult like adoration for him and therefore he isn't worried about losing support for radical actions.
3. Republican voters have been told to not trust the experts, news, or the opposing political party which eliminates all outside sources of information. This allows them to make claims about our debt or why we shouldn't pay it and many of these voters won't get opposing views.
4. Trump wants a massive increase in spending for the military and has cut taxes. While at the same time Republicans ran on the high debt. Not paying it by claiming it's invalid solves that.
In a mark to market world, the value of a bond is its acquisition cost, so buying bonds enough to raise prices increases their value, but not their coupons or their face value. It's hard to make sense of the value of a sequence of payments, it's reasonable to consider the present value and the market price is an easily justified present value for a bond.
Selling bonds and buying stocks is a different thing altogether. Selling US stocks and buying EU stocks wouldn't change the value of the underlying assets, however, having an increased stock price does have benefits for the company when issuing new shares or bonds.
There are a number of very important categories to avoid, like convertibles, but overall it’s quite possible if you have a little bit of acumen with investing.
https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/eu-budget/e...
In the meantime: German, Dutch, UK (technically not EU), Swiss, Nordic paper is also a good substitute and regardless all you really want to do here is not to hold an asset that may well become a liability so in that sense almost anything is better.
It seems to be precious metals. And at this point in time, especially silver. Even Indian government seems to be stockpiling silver.
Physical is great if you like Kangaroos, Koalas, Emus, Dragons, Snakes, Koi, etc.
They really need a Quokka: https://www.perthmint.com/shop/bullion/bullion-coins/
There is nothing particularly interesting or sexy about US treasuries. You could replace a holding of $8bn to $80bn with equivalent or better rated bonds in a half hour or so.
Replacing that sort of allocation of stocks or commodities would be way harder as returns on those assets are not as simple as "pays a 4% coupon each year" - finding an equivalent of Apple or Nvidia is not a trivial task.
That runs around $2 trillion.
I think he means also US stocks. So most of the wealth fund.
I make it only 1.5 trillion equities - they run about a 70 / 30 split stocks to bonds.
They could easily trim up their $50bn of Nvidia or their $50bn of Microsoft or their $40bn of Apple etc and put it to better use.
EU together with UK and Canada hold more Treasurys than the entire rest of the world combined, and if they dumped them all at once it would be significantly painful for the average American as interest rates would spike, as would inflation. The Dollar would decline against most other major currencies.
However dumping that much debt all at once would require the sellers to heavily discount a large portion of their bonds, earning them increasingly fewer, and paying in (depreciating) dollars.
It's exceedingly likely that de-dollarization accelerates from here, but it's also unlikely that even the Norwegian government sells it all at once. Rather than mass selling, expect EU entities to curtail or even cease buying US bonds altogether if the geopolitical situation doesn't improve.
I think all investors are now looking at this with this foresight. Being the first to dump seems to be the winning game here.
When you're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bonds you simply can't move that much in one go. That's an elephant-in-the-bathtub situation where your moves disturb the market because of their size.
Even the first entity to dump would still have to discount a lot of their bonds. Nobody on the bond market is going to make a $200B snap purchase.
Most Americans - this administration included - don't know how good they have had it, and are throwing it all away due to avarice.
Showing that you don’t want to be the last one out since either the risk or inflation hits you.
Indeed and QE is a major inflationary pressure.
That is just not true? Out of the $38T, ~75% is held be US Domestic entities. Even of the remaining 25%, these 3 don’t combine together to form a majority. It’ll come out to something like $3.5T out of the $9.1T foreign holding (~38%). Or under 10% of the total debt.
https://economicsinsider.com/top-15-largest-us-treasury-hold...
Anyway, how would that destroy the fund? They'd be selling it not giving it away.
Current total market value is about $2136B, of which ~$912B is invested in the US[1].
[1]: https://www.nbim.no/en/investments/the-funds-value/ (see map at bottom for regional figures)
However politicians have tried to use less, for 2026 they plan[3] to use 452B NOK which is roughly 2.13%.
However as OP points out, the total budget is around 2100B NOK, so the oil money pays for roughly a quarter. And that's becoming a bit of a problem in my view as well.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_budgetary_rule
[2]: https://www.regjeringen.no/no/tema/okonomi-og-budsjett/norsk...
[2]: https://www.regjeringen.no/no/statsbudsjett/2026/statsbudsje...
But from the bondholder perspective, being able to pick and choose which countries to hold Euro denominated debt according to their risk tolerance is an advantage anyway.
As an interesting thought experiment, imagine a central bank associated with a debt-free country issuing bond-like instruments. They would set an interest rate (perhaps with no auction, because they have no actual obligation to sell a predetermined amount, although an auction could still be used), sell bonds, delete the money used to buy the bonds, and issue new money to repay them with interest when they mature. This could be used as a way to act efficiently as a reserve currency and to exert a degree of control over inflation and the economy, kind of like how the Fed does it. The bonds would likely be considered extremely secure on account of the issue being entirely debt-free.
I would be surprised if the EU did this as such, since the EU probably does not want to be in the business of competing for capital with its own members, who do have a fair amount of debt that they need to finance.
Additionally, French bonds, while likely less-correlated with US Treasuries than other instruments, suffer from its own government having high debt levels; it's not a suitable safe-haven asset. Swiss and German bonds appear to be obvious alternatives. However, Swiss and German bonds' interest rates are low and in practice are little different than holding cash.
While gold appreciated in the short term, it is not simply inversely correlated with the value of the US Dollar. Its volatility is also driven by investors mitigating strict currency controls, mining productivity, and central bank activity. An unrelated downturn in one market could lead to a sell-off and wipe out gains. Gold also has no yield. Personally I think it's useful only in its physical form as a hedge for medium-term catastrophic events. Even then, a stockpile of food and clean water is likely far more valuable, if not substantially more difficult to store and maintain.
I ended up giving up, learning to love the S&P 500, and white-knuckling it ahead. Of the investable markets, the US one still generates the highest returns. (Chinese GDP growth is higher but its equities have low returns compared with other markets, due to political risk.)
> For starters it appears to be impossible to even trade in foreign bonds with traditional brokerage accounts in the United States (hosted by E-trade, Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab, etc).
Additionally, the UX is much better (IMHO) than Schwab, both on mobile and desktop.
The european union's GDP is a solid 50% behind the US (20 trillion vs 30 trillion). But more alarmingly the growth in the european union since the 2008 financial crisis has been totally anaemic: the growth doesn't even counter inflation and that growth only came at the cost of gigantic additional public debt. Meanwhile both the US and China's GDPs grew like mad.
I also dispute the stability of the EU: in many countries the people aren't happy at all and the far-right are winning elections everywhere. And it's only through tactics (like the center-right siding with the ultra far left in France to counter the far-right party who won the election) that parties that aren't the far-right are managing to prevent the far-right from reigning already.
For example in the European Parliament 36% of the 720 seats are for far-right parties. And that's after all the other parties colluding (including with the far left) to prevent the far right from having more seats.
And as people are more and more dissatisfied with the current situation in the EU, the far-right keep winning more and more voters (sounds familiar?).
> The Euro very well become a reserve currency in a multipolar world if Europeans decide they want to shoulder it.
The Euro is only 27 years old, is a badly conceived currency and may turn out to be one of the shortest lived currency ever. There's no way it's ready to take on the role of the USD. France's finances, the eurozone's 2nd biggest economy, are crumbling (gigantic public debt and insane public deficit) and may very well be overtaken by the International Monetary Fund (like it happened to Greece) soon.
Germany is trying very hard to ban its far-right AFD party from the elections for they know they could very well win. If I'm not mistaken the leader of the AFD said if they won, they're out of the EU. Think it cannot happen? UK left the EU already.
It's not just the EURO that may be the shortest-lived currency ever: the EU is actually in trouble.
Then again, they say whatever they need to in order for their paychecks to keep coming.
Swedish pension fund Alecta cuts US Treasury holdings citing US politics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46705118 - January 2026 (0 comments)
Bessent Shrugs Off 'Irrelevant' Danish Treasuries Sales - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46702927 - January 2026 (0 comments)
Danish Pension Fund AkademikerPension to Exit US Treasuries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46693791 - January 2026 (2 comments)
Danish pension fund to divest its U.S. Treasuries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46692594 - January 2026 (730 comments)
Or if we want to be cynical, they hope the price will drop on this news and they can buy back in more cheaply.
Sure, someone else is on the other side of the deal. But their demand is also satiated at a certain price point. Hell, if they wanted to buy from other sellers then it's not like T bills were not liquid.
Would you say the same if Norway's wealth fund offloaded their $181B? At those scales it would be more likely that it'd be visibly price affecting, and therefore affect the US's ability to borrow at existing cost.
So yes, when you sell your one NVDA, you are reducing demand and thus price. Epsilon, but nonzero.
If you're Honda, you'd prefer that the purchaser of any Honda is purchasing their Honda from Honda. Honda doesn't care about the secondary sale of any one Honda, per se, but they'd certainly care if people start opening dealerships with fleets of effectively brand new Hondas immediately next to every Honda dealership.
Additionally, every seller that was a previous long-term holder represents decreased demand for Treasuries at the primary auction. Mark Carney put it eloquently yesterday during his speech with his analogy of "taking the sign out of the window". This represents someone taking their bid out of the auction.
Someone else considered it worthy of sharing here and enough people here found it interesting enough to get it to the front page. I don’t quite understand why, but it seems like it’s striking some sort of chord.
So everyone doesn't want to be last and the sell-off takes off fast and violently, forcing unmanageable interest rates.
similar with the US T-bonds - this pushes the yield up making it more expensive for the US to finance its debt (which already consumes nearly a fifth of the entire federal budget).
Not, that it also fun to go with that story, but as long as everyone in the room understands it’s sort of a wishful fantasy.
This will take years, possibly a decade or more...if the US is, in fact, collapsing.
I don't see how this is huge in context, it is indeed symbolic.
Please don't get me wrong here, I am neither advocating the selling or not selling of US bonds. This specific sale just isn't statically significant in a vacuum. If this precipitates a snowball effect of bond-selling, completely different story.
I understand why people want this to be a bigger deal. It just isn’t. Not yet.
The US currently borrows an additional $9.5B every _day_ to fund itself.
> I don't see how this is huge in context, it is indeed symbolic.
I think if you approach the average new home buyer and said "We've reduced your bond repayment term to 13 years. Your monthly repayment will not increase" they will certainly consider it more than symbolic.
IOW, 13 years to payback is nothing compared to what we usually see for PE ratios of a bubbling stock, or repayment terms on a large loan, etc - it is definitely much much more impactful than you think.
> This specific sale just isn't statically significant in a vacuum. If this precipitates a snowball effect of bond-selling, completely different story.
I think that's the problem here - we're (all the commenters) trying to determine if this is the first pebble that starts the avalanche. All bank runs (in this case, a run on the debt in US dollars) starts with small but significant withdrawals (i.e. selling your dollars for some other money) that indicate to other holders to get their money out while it is still there to be gotten.
If someone thinks the value of those bonds is going to drop, then selling would have great significance for the seller.
Note that China has been selling US treasuries for months now (https://www.barrons.com/articles/china-sells-treasuries-9-st...) and there are signs that India has been quietly selling large amounts too. So it feels like the start of something much bigger, a total decoupling from the US due to its unstable politics, foreign policy, and quickly accumulating debt (Trump has added $5 trillion already and may add much more).