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.
> EU together with UK and Canada hold more Treasurys than the entire rest of the world combined
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.
In the past, the game was as played with the additional benefit of foreign bondholders and currency reserves slowing the overall velocity of money. The rest of the world has heen quietly blunting the inflationary effects of printing USD.
Most Americans - this administration included - don't know how good they have had it, and are throwing it all away due to avarice.
> 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.
I think all investors are now looking at this with this foresight. Being the first to dump seems to be the winning game here.
>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.
Maybe they wanted to say what you did, but accidently used the total worth of the whole Oil Fund (as it's called in Norway, because it was started with money taxed from oil companies extracting in Norwegian seas).
You have no idea how that would destroy the Norwegian State. They are addicted to money from that fund. A collapse in it's value would have direct impact on the finances of the state. Nearly 1/4 of the budget is funded from that found a year.
The politicians have set a self-imposed limit[1] on how much they can use per year. It's currently 3% of the funds value, to ensure we don't need to reign in too much during hard times[2].
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.
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.