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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

Politics drives decision making in addition to just seeking returns, especially for government affiliated funds, e.g.:

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...

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The EU has $8T invested in US assets. That's not an easy choice like a soccer mom choosing to go to the Caribbean instead of Florida for a weekend. It's very serious business that needs real alternatives.

This is talk about not investing more in the US though, is it not? Why it the top discussion so misconstrued about what is being said/reality? €300B <> $8T, yet somehow that is the discussion?

As long as they lose less than they lose by keeping it in $ they're coming out ahead.

They don’t have a choice, they sell they get back dollars. What are they going to swap 8 trillion dollars into? And an even better question how?

$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.

You definitely cannot do it all at once, all you can do is what China and India are doing, which is to slowly sell US treasuries over many years. China used to hold $1.3T of US treasuries but they now only hold just under $0.7T, thus about half has been sold. India similarly has reduced their holdings from $240B to $190 over the last year. It can be done, just not quickly.

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.

Both of them are doing it under pressure from the US to reduce how much debt they owe.

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.

> Push comes to shove the US can block a lot of these trades.

If you really want to see a re-run of 1929 that would be the way to get it.

> Both of them are doing it under pressure from the US to reduce how much debt they owe

Citation please?

For one, they can stop feeding Microsoft and other American conglomerates and develop Free Software alternatives.

Ok, but that doesn’t answer the question how do you cash out on $8 trillion dollars and convert them into another currency.

You sell into the market and buy a replacement asset. Easy peasy. No need to sell all at once, you simply change your strategy to invest new capital elsewhere and slowly roll off existing debt ownership.

Over time, the US will need to find someone willing to buy new US debt as existing buyers and holders invest elsewhere.

India and China are buying gold: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/india-and-china-move.... Good time to be a gold bug.

There's literally not enough gold in the world to make a difference at those scales. And while gold can serve as a (relatively) safe store of value, ultimately investors need to earn returns and holding gold has negative cash flow.

> What are they going to swap 8 trillion dollars into?

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!

Those are thin markets, and not necessarily even open to most EU investors. Also, good luck getting your investment back when there's another coup or civil war in the target country.

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.

> Those are thin markets, and not necessarily even open to most EU investors... coup or civil war in the target country.

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.

It becomes complicated pretty quickly if you're trying to deploy large amounts of capital into small, unsophisticated markets regardless of whether you label it "investing" or something else. But you seem to be confused about how this stuff works in the real world.

Contrary to the implication, the Swedish fund that possibly sold $8b of its $100b worth of US Treasuries did not cite politics as its reason for doing so, and no part of the article backs up that claim. Additionally, selling out of the US dollar as the fed aimed to cut rates and as the dollar declined from historic highs against the Euro seems sensible regardless of politics.

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.

To be fair, the Swedish pension fund specifically cited the US's "large budget deficits and growing government debt" for why they saw it as higher risk. That sort of thing is 100% politicians.

https://www.thestandard.com.hk/wealth-and-investment/article...

The cited rationale is a perfectly reasonable take.

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.

Its worse than you think: The United States is currently experiencing a massive, accelerating debt crisis, with the gross federal debt surpassing $38 trillion as of late 2025.

It is growing by $1 trillion roughly every 82 days.

This debt level, which has exceeded 120% of the U.S. GDP,

To be fair, the US has been growing its federal debt my whole life. It is one of those things that seems unsustainable but then it continues. Of course, it is sustainable because of US dollar dominance in the world and that may be faltering with Trump, especially if the Federal Reserve loses its independence.

Every sentence here seems reasonable, weird to see it gray.

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.

Hyperinflation is most likely, pay the debt with useless dollars. Other option is Debt Jubilee, which the Gov't would need to force lenders to write off the debt.

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

Yeah politics or not, the US stock market has a very high exposure to just a couple tech companies, and many of these companies have a very high P/E, and likewise hugely invested in AI (which itself is a risk). Add to that the recent (entirely self-inflicted) geopolitical questions of US reliability, I think it's a smart idea to reduce US exposure in one's portfolio.

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.

>Contrary to the implication, the Swedish fund that possibly sold $8b of its $100b worth of US Treasuries did not cite politics as its reason for doing so

Which doesn't mean it wasn't the reason.

Maybe it was more because the president is a fool and less because he is a jerk?

> 1 USD buys nearly $1.40 CAD.

Right before Trump (2024), 1.42 CAD at the top. During Trump, barely hits 1.40 CAD, one time it touched 1.37 CAD.

How much do EU government run funds invest in the US?

The governments can quiet easily influence private investment decisions by adding additional taxes to us-based market trades for example.

It'd be quiet easy if the EU governments actually wanted to do so - I'm not sure they actually do right now, however.

They can, but that invites retaliation. If they do it on all non-EU trades that is in effect an attack on investment in every non-EU economy. There are all sorts of consequences.

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.

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