US 10- and 30-year bonds are trading at their highest yields (lowest prices) since, uh, August/September 2025. Or in historical context, rates that were more common before 2007 and the ZIRP period.
What are some realistic alternatives to US markets here? Selling is one thing, the question is what to buy instead? I mean, everyone starting to buy european instead would be great for stock prices, but it wouldn't make the underlying assets more valuable, right?
i've wondered this myself. I thought that everyone was selling bonds and just buying equities, gold and bitcoin. isn't that only game plan? bonds aren't investible anymore for anything more than 5 year time horizon.
Sovereign debt of a more politically stable nation state or other monetary union, if you are investing at these levels. If you're an individual, you have more options, although there will be fierce debate about the risk profile (as US Treasuries were historically considered to be risk free).
The disciple went to his master and said "Master, I am considering stopping doing a thing and starting to do a different thing. But I am not certain what the new thing is that I should be doing".
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.
You've answered a different question than the one I asked. I think the US will continue to pay its debts, under this president and the one who replaces him in three years.
> The CFR Sovereign Risk Tracker can be used to gauge the vulnerability of emerging markets to default on external debt.
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.
Not "worth to invest in," just the higher criteria GP asked for: "a more politically stable nation state." It has to be strictly more stable than the US, not just investable.
You can’t invest in EU sovereign debt though, only the constituent countries.
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).
It depends on the goal. People buy bonds to play a certain role in their overall investment strategy. China and India have been quietly selling American bonds and focusing on gold / silver / etc. BRICS has also talked for a while about forming their own shared virtual currency but that is further away. You can buy other assets as a store of value too.
Well, if we're talking about the value of the underlying assets - then I imagine you have all your savings in gold because the PE ratios in the US stock market are already absolutely insane.
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.
They can start buying Euro bonds, Gold, bonds for the great european companies like ASML, Airbus etc?? they can basically find a way to invest in their future, right? they just need to figure out the right financial vehicle?
They could just reinvest the 8 billion in all the other stuff they're holding, but something like those if they want to keep the diversification ratios high. Maybe the Yuan or Chinese companies?
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.
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.
> 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).
The problem is that Europe doesn't have a European bond market to compete against the US bond market. It has the economic size and stability but not the will right now. Europe did try it a bit during COVID but financial services are just not there yet. The Euro very well become a reserve currency in a multipolar world if Europeans decide they want to shoulder it.
That’s a weird problem to have. The US has a huge bond market in part because the US has an absolutely enormous amount of debt, and the bonds are the US debt. The EU doesn’t have bloc-wide debt, for better or for worse.
As an interesting thought experiment, imagine a central bank associated with a debt-free country issuing bond-like instruments. They would set an interest rate (perhaps with no auction, because they have no actual obligation to sell a predetermined amount, although an auction could still be used), sell bonds, delete the money used to buy the bonds, and issue new money to repay them with interest when they mature. This could be used as a way to act efficiently as a reserve currency and to exert a degree of control over inflation and the economy, kind of like how the Fed does it. The bonds would likely be considered extremely secure on account of the issue being entirely debt-free.
I would be surprised if the EU did this as such, since the EU probably does not want to be in the business of competing for capital with its own members, who do have a fair amount of debt that they need to finance.
Is it at all realistic to expect the stable and/or fiscally conservative countries to accept the high bond yields imposed by the more fiscally loose or perceived-risky countries? Could this ever happen without the EU centralising more control over fiscal policy?
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.
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.
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 value.
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.
If the US paid $8B towards it debt every _day_ it would take over thirteen _years_ (completely ignoring interest accumulation, which isn't realistic) to pay off $38T in debt.
I don't see how this is huge in context, it is indeed symbolic.
Please don't get me wrong here, I am neither advocating the selling or not selling of US bonds. This specific sale just isn't statically significant in a vacuum. If this precipitates a snowball effect of bond-selling, completely different story.
Regarding your last sentence, this isn't happening in a vacuum, and rejecting the risk-free assumption behind US debt seems like a symbol with a lot of information content.
Exactly but it has to be recognized as such. It’s easy to fall into self delusion and make it into some “oh yeah this will be collapse of the US empire, finally” story.
Not, that it also fun to go with that story, but as long as everyone in the room understands it’s sort of a wishful fantasy.
We might, in hindsight, see this as the first signs of the fall but anyone expecting a global empire to just collapse like a building, even in the accelerated pace of the modern world, is going to be disappointed.
This will take years, possibly a decade or more...if the US is, in fact, collapsing.
Not really - it is going to show the world what alternatives people are pursuing as a strategy. Where they put their money will cause others to do the same. And the more people do it, the safer those new assets become. That will cause even more people to make the move.
Note that China has been selling US treasuries for months now (https://www.barrons.com/articles/china-sells-treasuries-9-st...) and there are signs that India has been quietly selling large amounts too. So it feels like the start of something much bigger, a total decoupling from the US due to its unstable politics, foreign policy, and quickly accumulating debt (Trump has added $5 trillion already and may add much more).
US 10- and 30-year bonds are trading at their highest yields (lowest prices) since, uh, August/September 2025. Or in historical context, rates that were more common before 2007 and the ZIRP period.
What are some realistic alternatives to US markets here? Selling is one thing, the question is what to buy instead? I mean, everyone starting to buy european instead would be great for stock prices, but it wouldn't make the underlying assets more valuable, right?
i've wondered this myself. I thought that everyone was selling bonds and just buying equities, gold and bitcoin. isn't that only game plan? bonds aren't investible anymore for anything more than 5 year time horizon.
Bitcoin is going down, wherever they're fleeing it's not that
Sovereign debt of a more politically stable nation state or other monetary union, if you are investing at these levels. If you're an individual, you have more options, although there will be fierce debate about the risk profile (as US Treasuries were historically considered to be risk free).
https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=449401
The disciple went to his master and said "Master, I am considering stopping doing a thing and starting to do a different thing. But I am not certain what the new thing is that I should be doing".
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.
Which nation states might you consider more politically stable than the US, even now?
Almost every 1st world country has a more predictable and honest leader right now
You've answered a different question than the one I asked. I think the US will continue to pay its debts, under this president and the one who replaces him in three years.
https://www.cfr.org/trackers/cfr-sovereign-risk-tracker
https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...
> The CFR Sovereign Risk Tracker can be used to gauge the vulnerability of emerging markets to default on external debt.
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.
Nothing is risk-free. But Canada is certainly more politically stable than the US.
Iran
I'm not sure a country can survive running out of water no matter how many revolutions they put down
But I am having a hard time identifying this union/nation. Unfortunately, it feels like the EU is set on a downward trajectory.
I'm a bit baffled by this - are you saying that you can't identify a single market in the whole world that is worth to invest in & stable except US?
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.
Not "worth to invest in," just the higher criteria GP asked for: "a more politically stable nation state." It has to be strictly more stable than the US, not just investable.
You can’t invest in EU sovereign debt though, only the constituent countries.
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).
Just needs to be more valuable than the US bonds that are 100% gonna tank I guess
“I don’t need to outrun the bear. I just need to outrun you. “
It depends on the goal. People buy bonds to play a certain role in their overall investment strategy. China and India have been quietly selling American bonds and focusing on gold / silver / etc. BRICS has also talked for a while about forming their own shared virtual currency but that is further away. You can buy other assets as a store of value too.
Well, if we're talking about the value of the underlying assets - then I imagine you have all your savings in gold because the PE ratios in the US stock market are already absolutely insane.
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.
They can start buying Euro bonds, Gold, bonds for the great european companies like ASML, Airbus etc?? they can basically find a way to invest in their future, right? they just need to figure out the right financial vehicle?
They could just reinvest the 8 billion in all the other stuff they're holding, but something like those if they want to keep the diversification ratios high. Maybe the Yuan or Chinese companies?
This is directionally significant compared to the Danish sale(~$100 million) of US bonds.
What would be more serious is if the Norwegian Government Pension Fund started to sell off US investments.
That runs around $2 trillion.
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.
Avalanches can start with a single stone.
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.
The fed would almost certainly intervene aggressively resuming large scale QE to buy up treasuries and stabilize yields.
> 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.
Norway only holds $219 billion in US Treasury bonds. What investments are you talking about?
https://www.nbim.no/en/investments/all-investments/
I make it only 1.5 trillion equities - they run about a 70 / 30 split stocks to bonds.
They could easily trim up their $50bn of Nvidia or their $50bn of Microsoft or their $40bn of Apple etc and put it to better use.
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).
>> sell off US investments
I think he means also US stocks. So most of the wealth fund.
is America great again yet?
The problem is that Europe doesn't have a European bond market to compete against the US bond market. It has the economic size and stability but not the will right now. Europe did try it a bit during COVID but financial services are just not there yet. The Euro very well become a reserve currency in a multipolar world if Europeans decide they want to shoulder it.
That’s a weird problem to have. The US has a huge bond market in part because the US has an absolutely enormous amount of debt, and the bonds are the US debt. The EU doesn’t have bloc-wide debt, for better or for worse.
As an interesting thought experiment, imagine a central bank associated with a debt-free country issuing bond-like instruments. They would set an interest rate (perhaps with no auction, because they have no actual obligation to sell a predetermined amount, although an auction could still be used), sell bonds, delete the money used to buy the bonds, and issue new money to repay them with interest when they mature. This could be used as a way to act efficiently as a reserve currency and to exert a degree of control over inflation and the economy, kind of like how the Fed does it. The bonds would likely be considered extremely secure on account of the issue being entirely debt-free.
I would be surprised if the EU did this as such, since the EU probably does not want to be in the business of competing for capital with its own members, who do have a fair amount of debt that they need to finance.
Is it at all realistic to expect the stable and/or fiscally conservative countries to accept the high bond yields imposed by the more fiscally loose or perceived-risky countries? Could this ever happen without the EU centralising more control over fiscal policy?
It's self evident that this is just the beginning. Expect one group of pundits to pretend this is irrelevant as long as possible.
A pundit saying "oh no, the world is ending" gets a lot more coverage than "nothing to see here, move along."
Then again, they say whatever they need to in order for their paychecks to keep coming.
Related:
Swedish pension fund Alecta cuts US Treasury holdings citing US politics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46705118 - January 2026 (0 comments)
Bessent Shrugs Off 'Irrelevant' Danish Treasuries Sales - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46702927 - January 2026 (0 comments)
Danish Pension Fund AkademikerPension to Exit US Treasuries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46693791 - January 2026 (2 comments)
Danish pension fund to divest its U.S. Treasuries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46692594 - January 2026 (730 comments)
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.
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.
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.
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 value.
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.
A brief search suggests this is around 1/4000th of the total US treasury market, so if this has any significance at all, it's symbolic.
1/4000th in this context seems huge to be honest.
If the US paid $8B towards it debt every _day_ it would take over thirteen _years_ (completely ignoring interest accumulation, which isn't realistic) to pay off $38T in debt.
I don't see how this is huge in context, it is indeed symbolic.
Please don't get me wrong here, I am neither advocating the selling or not selling of US bonds. This specific sale just isn't statically significant in a vacuum. If this precipitates a snowball effect of bond-selling, completely different story.
Regarding your last sentence, this isn't happening in a vacuum, and rejecting the risk-free assumption behind US debt seems like a symbol with a lot of information content.
But it might also signify (as in: be a symbol) that European funds are less willing to buy future US bonds, which has a more dramatic impact.
>> A brief search suggests this is around 1/4000th of the total US treasury market, so if this has any significance at all, it's symbolic.
If someone thinks the value of those bonds is going to drop, then selling would have great significance for the seller.
No one wants to be left holding the bag
"There have been spontaneous demonstrations amongst the workers voicing their joy and gratitude at our happy new way of life." - Orwell, more or less.
Symbolism has importance
Exactly but it has to be recognized as such. It’s easy to fall into self delusion and make it into some “oh yeah this will be collapse of the US empire, finally” story.
Not, that it also fun to go with that story, but as long as everyone in the room understands it’s sort of a wishful fantasy.
We might, in hindsight, see this as the first signs of the fall but anyone expecting a global empire to just collapse like a building, even in the accelerated pace of the modern world, is going to be disappointed.
This will take years, possibly a decade or more...if the US is, in fact, collapsing.
Every waterfall begins with a drop.
But 99.99% of drops do not cause a waterfall
Not really - it is going to show the world what alternatives people are pursuing as a strategy. Where they put their money will cause others to do the same. And the more people do it, the safer those new assets become. That will cause even more people to make the move.
Note that China has been selling US treasuries for months now (https://www.barrons.com/articles/china-sells-treasuries-9-st...) and there are signs that India has been quietly selling large amounts too. So it feels like the start of something much bigger, a total decoupling from the US due to its unstable politics, foreign policy, and quickly accumulating debt (Trump has added $5 trillion already and may add much more).