https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RS22331
As of 2024, 70% of debt is owed domestically, i.e. bonds are owned primarily by people within the US. Only 30% of US debt is owned by foreign interests.
Foreign debt is mostly owned by Japan:
- Japan, $1,061 billion, 12.4% of foreign debt
- China, $759 billion, 8.87%
- United Kingdom, $722 billion, 8.44%
It’s only when you group together all “European countries” that they collectively hold the most debt.
Here’s a more updated figure from 2025:
It seems like a trend right now is that China is divesting from the US:
Beijing’s stockpile fell to US$682.6 billion in November, down from US$688.7 billion in October, according to US Treasury Department data released on Thursday.
That marks the lowest level since September 2008 and a nearly 10 per cent drop since last January, according to financial data provider Wind.
The idea behind grouping them is that all those “european countries” can act as one through EU coordination. So it makes no sense to separate them when talking about negotiating power.
It doesn’t miss me that this is the desire or intent of this communication, I guess for me it raises all kinds of questions like:
- are all the European countries collectively holding that $8 trillion figure in the EU?
- what ability does the EU have to actually determine the debts that EU member states take on?
- what alternative to US bonds does the EU have for stable liquid assets?
That said, I support the EU on this - I hope they figure it out!
They also rely upon the rest of the world paying patent royalties and other IP associated revenue… funny how patents are basically a database of free valuable knowledge when you quit giving af about the owners 🤔
Europe knows how well such trade relations work to prevent conflict
OK, I feel like many people here don’t know what this means.
The US sells bonds to people. These bonds are promises to pay them back more in a certain number of years.
The EU can’t demand payment for all of that debt. What the EU CAN do, is selling the bonds it already owns, flooding the market. And not buying more themselves.
This would mean, that selling more bonds would become expensive for the US. Potentially they won’t find enough buyers to fund their government.
Canada already threatened that (or started to do this, I don’t remember) once already at the start of Trumps term. This might have been a factor for him backing of his invasion fantasies the first time.
TIL
US is a Ponzi scheme and US used this fraud money to make weapons in order to steal more money (oil) and prevent creditors from getting their money back 🤔The U.S. already bought the guns! Europe has been had!
They don’t even have to sell what they’ve got. They just have to stop buying more and invest elsewhere instead.
The US runs on a perpetually increasing deficit. If that line were to stop going up, we’d instantly fall into a recession.
They would be crazy to keep investing in the US at this point. Why throw good money after bad? Time to cut your loses and move on I think.
Because the US economy is like a coked up salesman, not a great guy, but he’s hit those growth targets out of the park. Until now. But he’s running out of gas and the party’s over, pissed off too many people.
Yeah and they are getting to a point where there isn’t much growth to be had.
Which is why I think he wants Venezuela and Greenland, I honestly think the US is kind of broke.
If that keeps the party going, then unfortunately some will keep investing.
Hence why it’s actually critical not to just give him Greenland, making it hard will have an impact.
All of this is dead on. I hope one day the US can regain the worlds trust, but I don’t expect it in my lifetime.
I’m surprised anyone trusted the USA after it broke the Bretton Woods agreement, said it was temporary, and then adopted a post-hoc Keynesian rationale.
US can issue domestically without issue.
It’ll be a few years until it gets to Weimar Republic levels.
Don’t forget that Trump has completely deregulated the crypto market. Even Americans don’t believe in America.
That’s certainly for personal gain. An emoluments violation should be an open and shut case.
US can issue domestically without issue.
Wasn’t tanking the bond market like the first thing Trump did in his second term? Or, I guess the uncertainty his “policies” result in (whether intentional or not) has tanked the bond market.
The only American bonds that I would buy, would be War Bonds for waging war against the Trump Regime.
In Jan 2024 the short term bonds were at 5% and long term at 4%. Jan 2025 and Jan 2026 short term bonds were at 4% and long term at 5%.
So, no. Bond market hasn’t changed much. Yet.
It was. And it was due to the tarrifs and uncertain nature (I.e. Trump chaos). Between that and cooking the GDP and Jobs numbers and firing hundreds of thousands of government employees that keep us functioning and you have a shit domestic market to sell into.
This might have been a factor for him backing of his invasion fantasies the first time.
Joke is on them, he is so vapidly stupid he forgot and is again threatening Canada.
To add context, part of getting Great Britain and France to back off in the Suez Crisis was Eisenhower threatening to sell off American owned debt in these two countries.
Were the leaders of Great Britain and France rot-brained orange fools at the time? I am assuming because they didn’t throw tantrums and dig in further that the answer is no.
Potentially they won’t find enough buyers to fund their government.
Nah. They only need to fund the interest. Domestic investors can do that for a decade or so. The rest is eaten by inflation.
A US bond embargo is a long term strategy, not short term.
I mean, Deutsche Bank is not exactly a good guy either. Same as pretty much all other banks.
consider they are solely responsible for russians being able to launder money to trump since the 90s and got us to where we are now with him.
I will side with the lesser evil. But so far it’s just empty words, they need to dump all of those bonds.
The problem is you then lose any leverage. The threat is what’s important. If you dump them then there’s no reason Trump would stop. If they hold them then they can use them as a threat.
Yeah, it’s a kind of mutual destruction tool.
However, if they were dumped, the EU would suffer financially, but Trump would not be able to simply continue, as the US economy would crumble.
The EU is the biggest lender to the US. The only reason the US is able to continue is due to all the borrowing.
The US has the largest external debt in the world, and the EU alone funded more than half of it.
The US couldn’t continue without the money from the EU.
This is one thing that Americans seem to be unable to grasp and think that the USA is/was funding the EU somehow, when on reality the USA just keeps borrowing more and more.
No, it wouldn’t stop the US. Russia’s economy is crumbling, but they can manage to keep fighting for several years now. A collapsing economy doesn’t stop wars. It only makes them harder. The threat can stop one potentially though.
The only reason Russia is able to continue is because they have a completely different economy to the USA.
Once capitalism crumbles, the USA will fall.
Dude, Russia has been a capitalist nation for decades. It’s the exact same kind of economy. Arguably they have a different form of governance, with Putin as a dictator. I don’t think we’re that far apart with that right now though.
Very noble of you.
The bank will side with whoever makes them the most money. Cutting off the US means a default on loans. They won’t do it, they will lobby their governments to not do it, and will only do it if their home country forces them to do so.
Yeah these people will do only what is financially expedient, they are amoral by definition.
The Beaverton had an article the other day “Canada chooses lawful evil over chaotic evil”
I’ve also seen posts online along the lines of “I’d rather deal with lex Luther than the joker”
Deutsche Bank was Trump’s biggest
lenderlaunderer. I guess they ran out of Russian cash?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Bank?wprov=sfti1#Banking_for_Donald_Trump,_1995–2021
In May 2019, The New York Times reported that anti-money laundering specialists in the bank detected what appeared to be suspicious transactions involving entities controlled by Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, for which they recommended filing suspicious activity reports with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the Treasury Department, but bank executives rejected the recommendations.
He’s not like Heath Ledger’s Joker. Not even Jack Nicholson’s Joker.
He’s more like…Jim Carey’s Riddler.
Jared Leto’s Joker.
I wish, that was the joker that everyone ignored and couldn’t get a single spotlight. trump manages to get all the fucking attention
Say what you will about Lex Luther but at least he had an ethos.
So do sam altman and elon musk 🤷
misguided and immoral though.
That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Yeah, same with Canada. We have about 430 billion in US debt. Admittedly not as much as Europe, but still a big chunk. And it was Carney that suggested other countries consider dumping this debt if tarifs went out of control.
Counterpoint:
If you owe the bank $100 that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.
– J. Paul Getty
I’m not defending the US, I’m just pointing out a teeny ten trillion dollar problem.
I think you’re missing the part where the US goes effectively bankrupt because it can’t sell debt. Everybody loses.
I think they’d just print more money first wouldn’t they? That would lead to high inflation, and they’d need more money so print more, and next thing you know they’re challenging Zimbabwe for the highest denomination bill?
Bye bye confidence in the dollar.
What do think tarrifs are for? They get people used to inflation.
Ok, serious question: say that happens and we end up with $1000 for a sandwich type hyperinflation overnight shit. I’m assuming most financial institutions would be in ruins, but assuming they’re not, what happens to people with debts? Like, they can’t increase the amount you owe, so if you owed them $50k for a car loan, and suddenly $50k is the equivalent of a soda, would that make paying off pre inflation debts easier? I’m guessing there’s a big caveat that in that situation most things would not be functioning normally at all anymore.
Like, I’m not trying to be all “hurry up with the downfall of the US!” or anything like that. Just curious how this would play out for individuals. Is there possibly some silver lining for people with large medical debts, for example? Just wondering.
I imagine the hyperinflation will be accompanied by hyper interest rates, just because. That way, every debt will balloon with prices and everyone will be in utter shit, except the lenders.
Interest rates are locked in as part of the terms of the lending contract, unless you’re talking about adjustable rate mortgages, which I am not. You’re factually wrong here, sorry.
It’s one of the paths to a debt reset, the most likely one at this point. Print money and hyperinflate the debt away
Just look at the historical examples of hyperinflation, e.g. Germany, Argentina, Venezuela. Your debts are technically wiped/worthless, but everything else goes to shit, and it takes at least a decade to recover.
So you’re saying there’s hope for the US…
/s
Inflation does make your debts easier to pay yes.
I could see the government trying to step in though and do something about that because that would be a shit show, but you do have a contract so fuck them if they try.
It would be such a shit show though globally if the US went through hyperinflation, so ya it’s not something we want.
They need to sell more bonds though. Europe can flood the market, leading to a collapse of the bonds value.
That would mean, more debt would become increasingly expensive for the US, potentially to the point where they won’t find more lenders.
Sure. But the trillions that Europe holds will become worthless if the US defaults.
Honestly those trillions seem to be on a fast track to being worthless either way. Might as well leverage them as a loud fuck off to the USA
Can we just add the trillions in euros to EUs bank account and tell the US they don’t have to pay us back?
You don’t even need to add them. After all, that money doesn’t physically exist. It’s just an annotation on a contability book. Just erase it and the debt is no more. If the world decides to “erase” those debt annotations on their contability books, the US debt stops existing.
And no one would buy US bonds if they just cancel their debt. So their economy would collapse.
But… we do want the money they owe us back right? Just not in worthless dollars.
He owes us money because a paper says so. If we decide that paper has no value, we can simply act as if the money he owes us is ours again, since it’s just a contability annotation.
I think this could be a potential play in a 2nd American Civil War. The EU and others can delay or restructure the debt of the Blue Union, while refusing to do any sort of trade with the Red Confederacy.
I mean, the Blue Union isn’t particularly great either, it’s just the lesser of two evils.
Personally, I would prefer a new nation, wholly progressive and garbed as a Green Democracy to separate it from the old guards. Hopefully, this…everything, has an emerald lining at the end.
That, and the US is a fiat currency system. Treasuries are a relic of the gold standard. If no one wants to loan the US the money it itself creates out of thin air, it can simply loan itself the money. Really, just will it into existence.
Europeans can exchange their dollar holdings for other currencies or spend their dollars on US goods or dollar-denominated oil. This would weaken the dollar and make imports into the US more expensive. But it’d make US exports more competitive.
I’m always baffled how people, particularly Europeans, don’t understand fiat currency. They have ceded their sovereignty to bond market vigilantes so thoroughly they can’t even conceive of a fiat system.
This particular threat seems like a way to wishfully think their way out of a poor defensive posture. Europe, you’re being squeezed by Russia on one side, the US on the other, and China is hollowing out your manufacturing. Time to hit the gym.
This devalues the currency making it harder to import things and if no one buys your exports you’ll have a very very sad economy. Printing money is possible but has very serious repercussions if you just yolo.
it would be the bank’s problem if burgerland stopped borrowing money. Instead they keep going because they can’t fund themselves. I wonder what could happen if nobody lent them any more money.
Then the US defaults, the dollar craters, and the trillions european countriesbhave invested are instantly worthless. Gone. Disappeared.
At a certain level, economics are just about good will.
If the whole world sees that the US don’t want to pay, on mutual accord, we can decide that they don’t owe anything to anyone, effectively cancelling the debt.
After that, the US will remain out of the rest of the world without the possibility of borrowing any money at all.
it takes two to tango, both parties willingly participated in this exchange
Yes, because until not long ago, the US were a country with shit stuff but somewhat reliable.
If you remove the reliability from the equation, one of the parties will most probably stop lending money to the other.
Haven’t Deutsche Bank been busted multiple times for being Putins money launderers?
I cant see capitalists sacrificing trillions for 60,000 people.
one of them being TRUMP.
They have been busted for all sorts of stuff the controversies heading (which feels like a misnomer) in their Wikipedia is quite long.
That said they could still be correct here.
They’re correct in that Europe holds trillions in US assets, my issue is with the premise that they’ll trade a towns worth of people for that.
Capitalists have made it known where there allegiances lie, and it’s not with the people.
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yes, but that doesn’t mean that they’re right or wrong about this. Also, thanks to lax regulations, at this point what bank hasn’t?
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this goes way WAY beyond 60.000 people because this won’t stop at Greenland. Also, this is something that a government could require banks to do. This also goes without mentioning that they’re not sacrificing much beyond getting money for the IOY papers.
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Yes, but this doesn’t go far enough. The entire world no longer benefits from a strong US. As an unreliable business partner and security partner, everyone should be coordinating the disuse of American tech, abandoning dollars and disposing of debt.
Its all unbacked liabilities now. Market makers can make the numbers go up for a time to incentivise the greedy, needy and stupid, but if there has ever been a clear case of a sinking ship, it’s the US. No one is free to do business anymore. This means that US tainted assets will tank and anyone left holding the bag will be sorry. Pension funds especially. The risk vs return equation just put a singularity on the risk side. No one can afford to do business under these circumstances. Radical market interventionism breaks investment, productivity and returns.
Get out while you still can. Don’t be the last one left holding the bag.
The entire world no longer benefits from a strong US
Never did. We tolerate the US because of their large rich population of mindless consumers, no brand would be crazy to not pander to this market, and no executive politician would want to disrupt trade. But that’s it, “the world” never truly liked the US.
“liked” and “benefits from” are two almost completely unrelated things.
Agreed. What makes you think the world at large benefited from a “strong” USA as quoted? We didn’t. We benefited, as in extracted value from, a rich USA buying goods.
All true, but the rules based order did create a period of relative peace and prosperity.
Because that is MAD. Literally. Economic mutually-assured destruction.
Who had “WW3 being started over a bounced check”?
Nah, these balls can be lightly squeezed, not just cut off. They can be squeezed lightly for a longer time, making Americans uncomfortable for months, or once in a not so gentle way.
The central banks can do that by selling bonds at a slughtly cheaper price than the US offers for their new bonds, forcing them to offer higher rates, making their debt more expensive.
It’s the perfect instrument, if you’re willing to pay the price.
I asked my old bank about this once, and they threatened to call the police. Fuckin’ shaved and everything.
As if the current administration would ever do such an outdated thing as “paying back a loan”. Of course getting a new loan is a problem for future-US.
Defaulting on a loan would have disastrous consequences.
There will be no default. Just printing of money once GOP controls the FED.
I’m relatively fine with that as long as EU dumps the debt before it sours.
I’m dreaming with this. Burgerland stops paying a loan and not only they stop getting any more loans, they simply could close the binders and say there is no country anymore.
The internal chaos that would ensue would force us to invent a new term: fourth world, for a country that fell so low that even third-world sounds too good for them.
Only problem I can see if they play that card, there’s a pretty good chance the US population responds by burrowing further up its own ass. Eventually, you have a very well armed rogue state (assuming we don’t already have one just yet).
So let’s continue with the appeasement policy. Worked great last time…
Not saying that’s what they should do at all. Look at my comment history. The guy is a bully and absolutely should be treated as such.
how long can an army obbey orders if they are not paid?
That’s a fair point, but who says the current army will remain the army? I bet there are plenty of “patriots” in this country who would happily step up for free.
They have to eat. They need to buy guns, gear, ammo… an army is expensive af.
An army of “free patriots” will last more or less a couple of months if lucky before they realize they need money to eat.
These are all well thought arguments, which makes me somewhat more convinced dear leader would try to do this! Not much of a planner, that one. Besides, in his mind we would be taking what we need. And other countries would be paying for it. You know, like his other boondoggles.
That money will come out of Musk’s and other billionaires’ pockets. They’ve been dreaming of the day they get to buy their own armies, beholden only to them.
High doubt. Musk and other billionaires don’t have that money. They have shares of companies that are worth a lot… today.
They are rich, they do have money, a lot. But most of it comes from those shares. Is tesla’s shares drop to near 0 value, musk will have shit.
Also, the us can’t make any primary goods on their own. Whose iron are they gonna buy? Whose aluminium? Rare earths? Hell, even the oil will be a problem. Not to talk about electronics; do you think china won’t take taiwan if all this happens?
A trained and organized army, even a small one, would absolutely mop the floor with a bunch of meal team sixers who care more about their own righteous indignation than on actually accomplishing objectives.
Indeed, Hatred is practically the fiat currency of the GOP.
The US population that would burrow further, will burrow further no matter what Europe does. They’re in a self-destructive cycle that requires no outside catalysts at this point.
The other half of the population would invariably be hurt alongside them, but I don’t think they’d suddenly turn and see Europe as the bad guy. Some of them would probably consider exercising jus sanguinis claims to European nationality, no matter how flimsy, in an attempt to leave their crumbling economy and fascistic government.
If Europe thinks this will merely be another American Civil War, localized to some far away hemisphere, I ask that they consider whether the situation more closely parallels World War II. There may come a day where the US attacks a NATO ally like Canada, triggering an Article 5 response. A Barbarossa in 2 years time, a D-Day in 4.
Bit hard to imagine a direct world war between nuclear powers.
