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Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries

reuters.com

521–530 of 857 posts

Re: Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposition to American hegemony shifted from Europe (ie the USSR) to Asia (ie China). To that end, NATO lacks the capacity to meaningfully impact a conflict in the Pacific. The EU simply does not have the means to project power in that way nor do they have the ability to meaningfully implement economic policies that would effectively reduce Chinese growth. Trump is an asshole, but the strategy hasn’t really chang…

> To that end, NATO lacks the capacity to meaningfully impact a conflict in the Pacific. The EU simply does not have the means to project power in that way This has been repeated elsewhere in this story. What's your thinking here? I assume you mean the non-US members of NATO, but you seem to have forgotten two G7 members if you're equating NATO - US with the EU. The remaining members include two nuclear-armed states,…

Yes, Britain and France have aircraft carriers but they are old, small and likely to be sunk by modern hyper-sonics. Europe's inability to project power is well documented though. Most of the 2025 literature is more related to overland mobility in Europe, since that is the piece Europe is currently working to fix, but the European militaries are not designed for global engagement. Most American documents on the topic don't even really mention NATO's involvement against China. Here's some stuff to consider though. Here is a decent primer:

https://warontherocks.com/2024/04/two-theater-tragedy-a-relu...

Re: Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FED can print as much money as it wants. Defaulting this way on US debt won't make the US a more desirable debtor nation.

I think you are missing the point. The point is it would materialize as inflation instead of debt default. Not that there is no downside risk.

Inflation is a kind of default, I'm not missing the point.

The value of the dollar is based on the promise of 2% inflation of a basket of goods. Breaking that promise is default.

Re: Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just one example: Elon Musk (at that time part of US government) tried to directly influence German elections by prominently featuring AfD (German right-wing extremists).

But why would anyone listen? That's the real question. People can say anything they want but most people are going to ignore crazy.

Last February, JD Vance had a meeting with the AfD leader in Munich, after delivering a stupefying speech at the Munich Security Conference where he accused European nations of failing to defend free speech, calling out Germany in particular. He complained that the AfD was being ostracized and called for it to end. Marco Rubio followed up by calling the designation of the AfD as a right-wing extremist party as "tyranny in disguise."

Actions like these where US leadership is heavily distorting the facts make it much easier for the AfD to present themselves as a legitimate political movement allegedly being wrongfully suppressed by the “authoritarian” incumbents. The AfD currently scores 25% in representative nationwide polls, higher than any other political party in Germany. In some federate-state elections they scored over 30%, in one of them again higher than any other party. You can’t just ignore them as “crazy“.

Re: Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That idea has been so destroyed by current events that I can only imagine that you are trolling or have been living in a cave for a few weeks. Check the news!

[flagged]

Re: Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just one example: Elon Musk (at that time part of US government) tried to directly influence German elections by prominently featuring AfD (German right-wing extremists).

But why would anyone listen? That's the real question. People can say anything they want but most people are going to ignore crazy.

They are often not that crazy. These days "extreme right wing" is what people call a party that wants to send some immigrants back.

Same kind of thing that got Trump elected.

Re: Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries

#526
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Supreme Court can rule Trump’s ability to unilaterally impose tariffs illegal (and they’ll be ruling one way or the other very very soon).

Are there mechanisms in place that will prevent them from delaying this decision until, say, 2029?

Not really. They can say "we shouldn't have taken this"[0], they can decide the case in a way that doesn't really offer any precedent (eg: these are the wrong plaintiffs to have brought the case), or they can remand it back to a lower court for more info. Prediction markets seem to think there's a 70% chance they'll strike down the tariffs though.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissed_as_improvidently_gra...

Re: Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no chance US will default on its debts, all it has to do is to print more money. Inflation may spirale, but it's going to be a US citizens problems (as well as US bond holders) in terms of inflation and budget cuts.

You’re assuming the people in charge are sane, rationale, and value past decisions that have worked out. It’s quite clear with the now likely permanent damage to NATO this isn’t the case.

> You’re assuming the people in charge are sane, rationale, and value past decisions that have worked out.

No, it's an assumption that the people discussing the subject are sane and rational. It's one thing to argue that the US devaluing its wildly overvalued dollar is an effective default. Nobody would disagree with that, that's why we did it - to give us the continual option for rugpulls. But it's simply delusional and unserious to insinuate that the US won't just print paper to pay off nominal debt. It costs the US absolutely nothing.

If the US doesn't do it and defaults, it props up the value of foreign-held treasuries by giving debtors a claim, it doesn't reduce it. We happily let the presses run since 2008, running up the stock market by nearly an order of magnitude, and didn't see a drop of inflation until the last presidential term.

Also, it's extremely weird that European elites think of NATO as some kind of local government. It's simply a US-invented and controlled institution that it used to pressure Russia (the US's competitor in a bipolar world), has had nothing but a corrosive effect in Europe, and now they do the job for free.

Re: Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries

#528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Fortunately Rayiner is not a representative sample of the USA.

His comments align much more closely with the plurality of 2024 voters than do yours.

> Effectively you've departed reality and you are now in a world of your own making where the facts are no longer relevant, just how you can stretch and twist everything to make it fit your worldview.

Glass houses, and all that.

Re: Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries

#529

So much American exceptionalism is just the Dollar exceptionalism. Without the G7 piling up dollars, there is no American exceptionalism.

The US has a lot of other things going for it. Rule of law, enterprise, most of the biggest companies in tech, entertainment and the like.

Re: Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries

#530
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you the think the EU and its individual country members from 1949 to present carried their fair share of the NATO spending ($55 to $60T), or troops and equipment deployments, or did they "default" on their side of the treaty? The US has paid 65 to 70% of the total of $1.4 to 1.5T/year from 2018 to 2025. That's 9.8T in 8 years (2018 included). Our soldiers, not theirs, carried the weight. If you go per capita, The…

You're counting the entire US military budget as "NATO spending" which is not a useful way to look at things. We only contribute roughly $800M to NATO's shared budget (about 16%)[1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/us-contributes-16-nato-an...

Also, from what I recall, the reason why US military budget appears so high is also because pensions for retired personnel (the highest invoice) are included in the military budget, whereas they are not e.g. in Italy where it's a different budget.
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