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Comment by ectospheno | Hacker News Reader

An equally valid headline is "Investors purchased $8B of US Treasury Bonds". Never really got the point of people announcing US Treasury sales like its a big thing. Someone else not thinking with their emotions can, and will buy them. Its like announcing publicly you are selling your Honda. Its your Honda bro, sell it.

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"Investors purchased $8B of US Treasury Bonds from the non-issuing entity."

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.

This is not exactly right. True, $8B is not earth shattering because of the US's enormous debt. But by removing a potential $8B owner, it is a reduction in demand, and thus a tiny reduction in price. This is literally the first rule of pricing: "supply and demand".

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.

The fund sold off most of their US bonds, some journalist heard about it and considered it newsworthy and published an article. DI.se’s readers are largely also benefactors/owners of Alecta’s, so that seems fair.

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.

It is the second substantial sell from EU. Additionally, those things gain momentum fast since the later you sell the less money you make from the bonds you are selling.

So everyone doesn't want to be last and the sell-off takes off fast and violently, forcing unmanageable interest rates.

What was the first substantial sale?

It has importance beyond that someone else bought the bonds. It also suggests they will not be buyers in the future. If they represent the beginning of a trend and Europe stops buying US bonds, that will be a serious blow to the US economy.

You could say the same when your stock price drops because large investors dumped your stock suddenly. Yes, there was a buying party (or they wouldn't have been able to sell), but the price drop hurts your company and worse can trigger more sales and more price drops.

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).

If Honda wants to keep the value of Honda at what it is today and enough people are selling their Honda's then Honda is at some point going to have to support the market if they want to have any chance of selling Honda's in the future. And Honda has only so much capital to spend before the company itself is at risk.

The classic “Sir, this is a Wendy’s”

Or if we want to be cynical, they hope the price will drop on this news and they can buy back in more cheaply.

Because the implication is that underlying asset is regressing or degrading. It's very obvious, and this comment just highlights your lack of reading comprehension.

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