Comment on YSK: Europe Can Wreak HAVOC On America Without Firing a Bullet.
zloubida@sh.itjust.works 1 day agoAgain, 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”).
gasgiant@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
The section you’ve quoted that line from is only talking about privately owned US debt.
As you can see from the actual beginning of the paragraph rather than picking out the words you like at the end.
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As I’ve already posted and mentioned right at the start of the pdf
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See where it says 44.2% are held by foreign governments. Governments.
In the document from Congress.
About their own national debt ownership breakdown.
Then when we look at the country breakdown of ownership of this debt later on there are plenty of European nations in there.
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zloubida@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
The beginning of the paragraph changes nothing. Two different sentences can have two different meaning; the text says “in the US and abroad”.
Again that’s a worldwide average. It’s not equally distributed. Prove me wrong instead of repeating your error.
Again, this table mixes public and private investor and is then irrelevant. Prove me wrong instead of repeating your error.
gasgiant@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Nope your turn to prove that none of this debt is owned by European governments.
I’ve provided the most reputable source that says the debt is owned by governments and within their breakdown it says some of those countries are European.
It doesn’t provide a detailed breakdown of private Vs government for these countries but no where does it say that is debt is only privately owned in European nations.
You need to prove that or stop talking nonsense.
Although not technically part of the EU anymore the UK government has confirmed a number of times that it owns US debt. Other nations will certainly do this as well.
Unless you can provide a source that says that no European governments own US debt you’re just making things up.
zloubida@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Show me where I said that European governments owned no US debt, please. I said that it was mostly owned by private agents. The keyword here is mostly. Mainly. For the greatest part. Predominantly. Don’t change the terms of the discussion now that you feel cornered.
Of course the UK, Luxembourg, France or Ireland own US bonds. But what is owned by European countries is largely dwarfed by what’s owned in European countries. Not a word in the Congress’s document contradict that, and I provided a source that you conveniently ignored.
So if the European countries sold what they own directly, the effect would be weak. For this idea to work, they’d have to make private agents cooperate, and I don’t think they can.