Comment on YSK: Europe Can Wreak HAVOC On America Without Firing a Bullet.

zloubida@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• gasgiant@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Ok except you’re completely wrong. The foreign holdings are both private and government owned. From www.congress.gov/…/RS22331.51.pdf

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  • zloubida@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Ok except you’re completely wrong. Governmental investments in US are mainly made by countries outside Europe, like China. The only European exception is Norway, which alone can’t do much (and is not in the EU).

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    • gasgiant@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Hmmm except that just saying the same thing again still doesn’t make you right.

      When you get further down the pdf from Congress (or any other valid source on government debt breakdown) there’s a number of European countries. Such as this.

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      Have you got any actual sources for your statements other than just repeating the same thing?

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      • zloubida@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Again, your table doesn’t differentiate public and private ownership. You obviously don’t understand the numbers you’re sending. Citing page 1 of your own link:

        Investors in the United States and abroad include official institutions, such as the U.S. Federal Reserve and foreign central banks; financial institutions, such as commercial banks; and private individual investors.

        Both financial institutions and individual investors are private. So your link is totally irrelevant to our discussion (as you would know if you had read it). Yes, for example Luxembourg holds $423.9 billions, but do tou actually think the Luxembourgian state owns it? Of course not! Luxembourg is a trading place where a lot of holdings are based. These holdings hold the far biggest part of those billions. It’s the same with the UK (the London City is another trading place with a lot of holdings). And most of European countries.

        As far as I know, the US Treasury doesn’t communicate on this, so we don’t have strict numbers. But it’s a well-known thing, as stated the Financial Times recently:

        But this doesn’t change the fact that most of these assets are not actually owned by European governments (the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund being the only notable exception). These stocks and bonds are actually overwhelmingly held by the private sector: thousands of insurance companies, pension plans, banks and other institutional investors, and millions of ordinary people.

        I’d love for Europe to have this kind of power, but we simply don’t have it (we have others however, like the “commercial bazooka”).

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• ViatorOmnium@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  There’s no way to compel them to sell them.

  On paper no. In practice, when you consider how much economy at that level is driven by quid pro quo, that statement sounds almost silly. It’s not a matter of whether governments can trigger a mass disinvestment, it’s a matter of the cost.

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