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.
“I don’t need to outrun the bear. I just need to outrun you. “
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.
>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.
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.
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[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.
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.
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.
There's a reason proper countries have had 5+ constitutions and keep changing them.
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.
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.
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).
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.
"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
> 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?
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.
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/
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.