Macron is making up numbers. Unless the EU member states actually impose capital controls, investors will continue to send their capital wherever it can earn the highest returns. Profitable investment opportunities in the EU remain slim and so far they seem uninterested in pursuing a growth policy.
Politics drives decision making in addition to just seeking returns, especially for government affiliated funds, e.g.:
Canadian tourism visits to the US have dropped massively in the last year, not because Canadian tourist spots are better or more fun now (e.g. pure market forces), but again because of politics:
The EU has $8T invested in US assets. That's not an easy choice like a soccer mom choosing to go to the Caribbean instead of Florida for a weekend. It's very serious business that needs real alternatives.
As long as they lose less than they lose by keeping it in $ they're coming out ahead.
They don’t have a choice, they sell they get back dollars. What are they going to swap 8 trillion dollars into? And an even better question how?
$8 trillion is about half the M3 of the Euro.
In fact there are only about 20 trillion dollars right now, there isn’t even enough liquidity to cash out.
You definitely cannot do it all at once, all you can do is what China and India are doing, which is to slowly sell US treasuries over many years. China used to hold $1.3T of US treasuries but they now only hold just under $0.7T, thus about half has been sold. India similarly has reduced their holdings from $240B to $190 over the last year. It can be done, just not quickly.
Stocks generally survive currency devaluations, but treasuries do not. So I am not a fan of treasuries in this environment, but US stocks should be fairly resistant except for their dependency on the US economy, which could be disrupted in a currency devaluation.
For one, they can stop feeding Microsoft and other American conglomerates and develop Free Software alternatives.
Ok, but that doesn’t answer the question how do you cash out on $8 trillion dollars and convert them into another currency.
How much do EU government run funds invest in the US?
The governments can quiet easily influence private investment decisions by adding additional taxes to us-based market trades for example.
It'd be quiet easy if the EU governments actually wanted to do so - I'm not sure they actually do right now, however.
Contrary to the implication, the Swedish fund that possibly sold $8b of its $100b worth of US Treasuries did not cite politics as its reason for doing so, and no part of the article backs up that claim. Additionally, selling out of the US dollar as the fed aimed to cut rates and as the dollar declined from historic highs against the Euro seems sensible regardless of politics.
Denmark has been exiting foreign bonds for 10 years, down from a high of $24b in 2016 to $10b in 2025. It’s not only part of a trend, but the cited $100m of bonds sold makes up a negligible 0.00026% of US treasuries.
On that note, 1 USD buys nearly $1.40 CAD.
Politics makes it easy to write stories that paint an incomplete or incorrect picture.
To be fair, the Swedish pension fund specifically cited the US's "large budget deficits and growing government debt" for why they saw it as higher risk. That sort of thing is 100% politicians.
The cited rationale is a perfectly reasonable take.
But most of the world is in the same boat of "large budget deficits and growing government debt". It will be "interesting" for bond issuers and most investors and "exciting fishing" for hedge fund sharks over the next 10 years or so.
That said, I do not agree that it is 100% politicians. At least in the US, that path has been virtually unavoidable after the fiscal spending by G.W. Bush on the 9/11 wars and fully set in stone after 2008 subprime crisis. For the last 15+ years politicians could slow down or speed up the transit a little, but getting off that train has not been an option. My 2c.
Its worse than you think: The United States is currently experiencing a massive, accelerating debt crisis, with the gross federal debt surpassing $38 trillion as of late 2025.
It is growing by $1 trillion roughly every 82 days.
This debt level, which has exceeded 120% of the U.S. GDP,
To be fair, the US has been growing its federal debt my whole life. It is one of those things that seems unsustainable but then it continues. Of course, it is sustainable because of US dollar dominance in the world and that may be faltering with Trump, especially if the Federal Reserve loses its independence.
Yeah politics or not, the US stock market has a very high exposure to just a couple tech companies, and many of these companies have a very high P/E, and likewise hugely invested in AI (which itself is a risk). Add to that the recent (entirely self-inflicted) geopolitical questions of US reliability, I think it's a smart idea to reduce US exposure in one's portfolio.
Circling back to AI, my (not politically motivated) opinion, is that most of the tremendous supposed value was priced in into AI stock back in 2024, with 2025 gains being either relatively modest or stagnant. With the risks involved, I think it's fair to expect that AI companies can go down a lot, but it's hard to imagine them going up by that much.
Like, for example if NVIDIA gained another $1T in market cap, that'd increase the stock price by 22%, but if they lost that much, it would make it go down by 36%. If we consider both outcomes equally likely (not suggesting this is a reasonable assumption), we're more likely to lose money.
>Contrary to the implication, the Swedish fund that possibly sold $8b of its $100b worth of US Treasuries did not cite politics as its reason for doing so
Which doesn't mean it wasn't the reason.
Maybe it was more because the president is a fool and less because he is a jerk?
> 1 USD buys nearly $1.40 CAD.
Right before Trump (2024), 1.42 CAD at the top.
During Trump, barely hits 1.40 CAD, one time it touched 1.37 CAD.
Unfortunately the US Dollar is devaluing. In the past year the dollar went down by 11%. That means SP 500 which has gone up 13% in the past year has only gone up 2% for a European.
It's a matter of perspective, for the US administration, that 11% drop is reason for celebration.
Their goal is to make American blue collar manufacturing jobs viable again, and part of the plan is to make it cheaper for other countries to buy their goods.
It's not the first time the dollar has been intentionally devalued.
Not if the European invested in currency hedged vanguard sp500s
This means that from a European point of view, US investments are 11% cheaper.
This could be attractive depending on your view of the future of the US dollar and US stock market.
Well no thanks, the US is going the same path Hungary and Turkey, just with a 10 year difference, autocrats are never good for business.
As soon as Trump came in power I sold all my dollars and I was wise to do it.
Expect things to go much more worse from here, this is only the beginning. For now the FED has relatively been untouched, it's not going to stay pristine forever.
The fact that the EUR/U$S parity did not change much means EUR devaluated about the same, doesn’t it?
No the $ devalued against the euro by about 11% in the past 12 months. Look at a chart.
False. Dollar has crashed against Euro.
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> Unless the EU member states actually impose capital controls, investors will continue to send their capital wherever it can earn the highest returns.
You don't need to introduce capital controls to make it unattractive to invest in the US. There are plenty of options that the EU could pull that would make investments abroad very unpopular quickly.
Like how…?
By taking inspiration from the US. The US has PFIC for instance and many other reporting requirements that make it more attractive to invest in the US than abroad.
Yea, but how?
The EU can barely get the Mercosur FTA out the door. How can it even attempt to make such a drastic change that would make FDI in the EU less attractive than equally large and equally onerous China?
And that ignores the fact that states like Poland, Ireland, and Czechia would ferociously fight back at anything that threatens their FDI driven economies.
Even Ireland opposed the Anti-Coercion Instrument [0] four days ago, and everyone still remembers Belgium's unilateral opposition to seizing frozen Russian assets barely a month ago.
That Europe is incapable of doing anything bold is a different topic. You don't have to tell me how fundamentally screwed we are because of the consensus issue. But Europe could, without introducing capital controls, implement something. The US did, there is no fundamental reason why Europe could not either.
It's just a question of political will
If something is hypothetically possible but practically impossible, then the mental exercise is a waste of time, and distracts from thinking about an actual solution.
For example, Trump could impeached and removed from office, but that isn't happening. So what's the solution?
I think if people were forced to invest their pensions in shitty EU stocks there would be push back. Also moving public sector pensions into EU stocks won't deliver the growth required, they are already unsustainable.
I exclusively responded to a comment about capital controls, which are even less likely. I'm not particularly interested in a discussion about what politicans might or might not do.
Those are capital controls by another name.
but not necessarily capital controls by a similar legislative difficulty, although at this point it's somewhat abstract what is being discussed.
No idea what this number actually is. If it includes pension funds' investments in the US stock market and US bonds, then it is underestimated.
> investors will continue to send their capital wherever it can earn the highest returns
Maybe. But they're allowed to avoid junk bonds and other "risky investments".
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Counter argument: people invest in bonds. Quite a lot of bonds in fact.
Picking up pennies in front of a steam roller and counterparty risk seem to be perennial favorites of youth, but I hazard to guess only a minority in the market have flesh yet untouched by fire.
Yes, but also no.
Pension funds around these parts are big, we are often forced to pay into them.
Years ago, I noticed they started advertising green funds. Would not be surprised to see options that exclude the US too.
If you look at Trumps polls across EU countries, it is heavily in the negative and a lot of us are wanting to put our money where our mouth is about it.
> Pension funds around these parts are big
Not really. Most EU countries don’t even have noticeable state pension funds (and one of the biggest culprits is actually France). They just rely on younger people to support the pensions of the retired ones.
You're forgetting about private pension funds. Those are massive, and often mandated by a collective bargaining agreement.
Not in France they aren’t. And not in most EU countries that still rely in pay as you go pension systems.
For comparison. France’s pension funds (total public and private) are 12% of their GDP. Total EU pension funds are also around 20% of total EU GDP. USA pension funds are 170% of their GDP!!!
It's not either-or, necessarily.
Yes, we have a pays-as-you-go pension system in Denmark (sigh). But regulations were also changed a while back such that employees must pay into a pension scheme of their own.
In our case, that's handled via your employer and there's a minimum contribution limit and often incentives to pay a higher level.
((not my area of expertise))
Maybe, but so does Trump. And that’s who these figures are really meant for.
I doubt it will make any difference though, because Trump is about as brain damaged as they come.
Indeed it sounds a lot like Trump's bs, so Trump might buy it. It's almost like "those s**hole countries sending is their worst to eat our cats and dogs" or "subsidies we send every year to all over the world".
Similar thing to what the UK did post-Brexit?
Except in a floating exchange rate that isn’t what happens. For somebody to leave the Eurozone for the Dollar zone there has to be somebody coming in the opposite direction to exchange with.
Macron is still talking nonsense of course. The Euros never left in the first place.
> For somebody to leave the Eurozone for the Dollar zone there has to be somebody coming in the opposite direction to exchange with.
Does that mean trade imbalances don’t exist?
> Macron is making up numbers
So is Trump. This is all just response to bullying.
"I got big muscles"
"Oh yeah, I got big muscles too"
This all is happening because America elected a criminal clown, twice.
Let me fix that for you. This is all happening because the institutions in America failed to deliver for working-class people for over four decades, and Americans got fed up, elected a billionaire willing to be a bulldozer of those institutions and the systems that work for knowledge workers, twice.
And how does that work for them?
Fantastic for my knowledge worker 401(k)!
All politicians will say what people want to hear.
American voters elected the people who ran those institutions, or appointed the leaders of those institutions.
I know we all want it to be some shadowy cabal so we can pretend the average person didn't cause this, but it isn't. We did this to ourselves.
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> The only reason the IMF hasn't taken the reins of France yet is because France has the nuclear weapon and is the only country in the eurozone to have it, so they have some leverage with the other countries in the eurozone.
First of all IMF has nothing to do with the Eurozone. And second of all, we are Europeans. We don’t threaten to bomb our neighbors if they don’t give us what we want. That’s just a Russian/American thing.
Only for the past 70 years. Before that europeans were the bomb-lobbing record holders.
Yes, that is true. In the past we were primitive like Russians/Americans.
The EU being our peace project, which both Russia and the US now want to undo.
How many percentage of GDP is healthcare in the US? 10, 20%?
Healthcare is almost entirely public in France (pension also mostly are), so I'm not sure that your comparison makes sense.
Healthcare is about 17% in the US GDP and 30% of the federal budget. The US spends more on public healthcare as a % of GDP than almost all European countries, including France which spends about 12% of GDP on healthcare.
It's hard to get a comparable read since you don't get a clean split in the #s between what would be public spending vs. private spending if the US + a "Medicare for All" type system, but including the % of GDP spent in US on healthcare overall, it would put government expenditures as % of GDP on par with most other countries in the world that do provide universal health care:
France certainly has a higher % of expenditure to GDP than other comparable countries, and you would expect the USA health care to GDP % to decline to be more inline with other countries with universal coverage if a national program was introduced.
However, because France is still offering more public social services and benefits overall vs. a "USA + universal health" that it's hard to make broad claims either way about who is wasting more money or which system is more effective for citizens based purely on % of government expenditure to total GDP.
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meanwhile 6-week vacations, high speed trains, walkable cities, generous child benefits, and, well, quality of life salute you from here
All great things for sure. But the French economy has been stagnant for decades. There is no growth. One option would be to allow more immigration, but not allow the immigrants to have access to the public benefits. Obviously that is a divisive political issue they struggle badly with.
> the French economy has been stagnant for decades. There is no growth.
This is one of the biggest reasons why it is trivially easy for USA, China, and Russia to squeeze them (and the whole EU) from all sides.
6 week vacation?
Europe has been on a 30 year vacation, and it's starting to look like that vacation might need to end.
The issue is a lot of French people in the private sector (small businesses, contractors etc.) actually work really hard and often long hours to subsidise public sector employees barely working and retiring at 55.
At the end of the day, that just isn't sustainable politically and it's pretty questionable if it's morally correct either
At some point the money runs out for all of that stuff, it seems that in France that's just about to happen.
One thing I remember from civics class: governments should think in terms of generations; not profits/losses.
That's true, but you have to actually be investing in growth for it to come up. Instead the next generation will get both spiriling interest payments and crumbling infrastructure.
> The only reason the IMF hasn't taken the reins of France yet is because France has the nuclear weapon and is the only country in the eurozone to have it, so they have some leverage with the other countries in the eurozone.
Haha, what? How is France having nuclear weapons leverage over other countries in the Eurozone? What kind of thing do you think the Eurozone or EU even is? We don't use threats of violence against each other in negotiations. France having nuclear weapons or not matters zilch in these conversations, because we're all allies.
> Haha, what? How is France having nuclear weapons leverage over other countries in the Eurozone? What kind of thing do you think the Eurozone or EU even is? We don't use threats of violence against each other in negotiations. France having nuclear weapons or not matters zilch in these conversations, because we're all allies.
Greece says hello!
... did I miss something? I know there is plenty of financial and institutional coercion, don't get me wrong, but violent threats between nations within the Eurozone? When did that happen / what are you referencing?
Well they're right: The IMF routinely takes over countries that have too much debt, but it hasn't done this to France.
The IMF usually only gets involved in policy when countries borrow money from them. So far, France has not had to request such aid.
Which ones?
I took it to mean more that europe relies on France for nuclear deterrence against outside threats so treats them with gentle gloves more than Europe is afraid of France nuking them. Right now more than ever they really need someone with nukes on their side.
> I took it to mean more that europe relies on France for nuclear deterrence against outside threats
Yeah, that tracks, re-reading with that interpretation makes it make a whole lot more sense than what I understood at first reading. Thanks a lot for helping me understanding it better!
> How is France having nuclear weapons leverage over other countries in the Eurozone?
If there's one thing a bank is scared of, it's getting nuked. /s
Isn't the US running a deficit of 5.8% of their GDP as well?
I think the issue here is that France can't print more euros to cover it, other countries have to cover it since they share currency they are all responsible for the debt
TIL EU savings rate is far more than US. 18.79% vs 3.50%
Guessing that's somehow counting enforced deductions off paycheques. Would be a wild difference if not.
Even the poorest EU countries are actually surprisingly wealthy.
Bulgaria was switching to Euro on the new year’s eve and the easiest way to convert Leva to Euro was to put the money into the bank, so Bulgarian deposits reached 100B+ levas into personal accounts by November which converts to ~50B+ Euros. Which is over 10K Euros per Bulgarian adult. Not bad for the poorest country, considering that home ownership rate is also very high(%86 IIRC).
The life is pretty good for a GDP per capita of $18K.
Home ownership can be a deceptive stat in Eastern Europe - many people don't register their address at the place they rent - in part because they're renting it under the table.
Tons of folks also live with their parents into their 30s.
Those numbers are quite off. The total amount of Leva in circulation at the end of 2024 was round 30B. End of November 2025 in circulation around 23B.
By the mid January %58 of the leva were removed from circulation BTW.
Total deposits in the bank accounts sure. I understood it as they deposited 100B of their cash into their bank accounts by November.
fair, edited for clarification
The Europeans I know seem to save in actual bank savings accounts, whereas the Americans I know seem to invest their money. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough, but I can't find a description of "savings" on those charts. To me, they are both types of investment, one a super safe option with a low return, and the other a more risky option with a higher return.
From that Draghi paper a year ago or so, I believe part of Europe's innovation problem seems to stem from a lack of private investment by individuals in this way, so that would also align with this different philosophy on dealing with savings.
There's no "enforced savings" that I know of in Europe.
3.50% in the US sounds extremely low to me. It has fallen a bit recently but the savings rate was about 25% in France in 2020. Common knowledge says to strive to save at the very least 10% of one's revenue around here.
It seems like savings include pension ([1], but it is a bit unclear to me) , and that is a kind of forced saving (as in many places in Europe you can't choose to not get pension and get it as cash to spend instead).
It's not clear to me either, but as I understand it it doesn't include pensions because social contributions are not part of "disposable income".
I think that "the net adjustment for change in pension entitlements" is there to take into account the expected reduced future income from pension entitlements dwindling over time (edit: in effect, making pensions count as negative savings) somehow, but it's unclear.
I looked for another perspective but the French national bank doesn't mention pensions in its explanations[0].
Sounds like they don’t count that. They seem to only count disposable income and payments the company does to your retirement aren’t really disposable
The UK has "enforced savings" in the form of auto-enrollment pensions for over 10 years. Looks like Ireland is just starting to do it too.
That's mostly to prepare teenagers at the time for having no state pension in 50 years.
I have about seven of the buggers and I'm only in my mid 30s.....
Pensions or teenagers?
There is a very large and growing portion of the US that maintains no savings at all. In fact it's the opposite and many are slowly spending their way into perpetual credit card debt.
It's essential to the way the system works. One person's money is another person's debt. Normally the government would take on enough debt to ensure everyone had money, but the USA is a weird case.
According to some sources, 1 in 4 Americans don't/can't save at all.
In the US people take on personal debt for something like a car. In the Netherlands (where I live) this is very uncommon: people save up, then buy it.
Our public transportation infrastructure is so badly managed that many jobs will ask you if you have reliable transportation and fire you if you find yourself without it. If your car breaks here it's often not really a option to save up for a bit first.
Part of "freedom", yes?
Also helps that most people don't start with an extremely large student loan when they have finished their education.
I'd argue accumulating too much wealth compared to your salary can be a bad thing - for example, real estate compared to salary is even more expensive in Europe than the US - so the extra money doesn't go anywhere useful, you just get to pay more for the same stuff.
Also, if the US person pays less taxes, but has to pay for a bunch of services that the EU person would get for free, that means the US person has a lower savings rate, even though they're paying for the exact same stuff.
Retirement accounts are more like social security than 401k. There’s no set amount of euros set aside for me it’s all in the pool paying for older peoples retirement
This doesn't surprise me at all as an European. My mind struggles to understand how so many Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
And yet there's no lack of demand for US investments, because they're attractive to foreign investors. (This is the flip side of trade deficits.)
I wonder how much of EU savings is invested in foreign countries?
The US can always print more money to fund its institutions, but other countries have to save theirs. Sure, they can print more euro but when so much stuff they need is traded in USD, that's not nearly as effective as when the US prints more USD.
> The US can always print more money to fund its institutions, but other countries have to save theirs.
That only works if there are takers for US bonds otherwise all this will do is devalue the USD.
If like me you are wondering why the sunglasses, it looks like he is using that to mask an eye infection.
The EU can’t even get a Mercosur deal closed after 30 years. I think this will probably happen in another 60 years.
I thought Americans today are pro-tariffs and against free trade? US is still unable to get a free trade deal with mercosur.
OP isn't American.
It's hard to overstate how much a beating the EU's reputation took after the Mercosur fiasco.
Lula took a massive political risk to push the EU-Mercosur FTA despite the power behind the throne in Brazil being wooed/bribed by the Trump admin [0] and already on the fence about the EU-Mercosur FTA because they are Ag Barons that primarily trade with the US and China [1] AND during a hotly contested election year.
This only makes the EU look like a less attractive negotiating partner, and incentivizes countries to unilaterally negotiate with individual EU states instead of the EU as a whole, thus undermining the entire EU.
If the EU alienates China, the US, Russia, Brazil, India, ASEAN, Japan, Korea, etc who else is left?
That is the whole crux of Carney and Zelenskyy's speeches at Davos.
> US is still unable to get a free trade deal with mercosur
Instead, we get an REE extraction deal in Brazil [2], financial backing for our current Venezuela escapade [0], and a president exporting Hispanic American-style far right politics into EU member states like Spain [3] and Italy [4] where right-leaning South Americans have become a major political voting bloc.
The more isolated the EU becomes, the easier it is for countries to begin taking advantage of European nations on their terms.
What makes it more ridiculous, is that fact that we from the EU are shouting US is getting isolated, but some of the biggest economies in the world do not want to trade with 4 countries from the 3rd world, because we think will get bankrupt because of that.
I'm sure everyone would be happy to purchase stuff that respect our own standards. We forbid our farmers to use some chemicals because they are bad for health and nature, it would be completely stupid to start purchasing food abroad that is made using those chemicals, don't you agree?
Sorry, the standards imposed to meat from south america is way higher than the European. Wine is nearly impossible. And spicies like paprika also require higher standards than in Europe. I don’t know what you mean with that. Free trade does not mean there are no standards to met. Same standards will be imposed (as are already imposed) to anything imported in the EU. Also in south America, because of size you don’t need nearly as much chemicals as in EU anyway.
Last but not least, that of quality standards and chemicals doesn’t hold anyway, as there are already loads of products coming from those countries already… I look always where things come from, and fruits come up to 80% from South America (including Mercosur). Dang even apples from Argentina in Germany, which is frankly non sense to me! It’s just not about quality, is good all protectionism and imposing tariffs, just as Trump is doing, but if we do, is ok.
Yes, I agree with the standards, but has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with the agreement Mercosur/EU. The standard will be imposed for ANY product sold in the EU, doesn't matter where it comes from, as it should be.
Do you have sources for what you say for meat for example? From what I could read on this topic, they don't have the same traceability constraints, may use growth hormones that are forbidden here, etc.
To add to the absurdity, one of the thing we Europeans will be able to export more to SA is chemicals, including those which we forbid here because they damage health and environment...
> but some of the biggest economies in the world do not want to trade with 4 countries from the 3rd world,
It's this attitude that makes non-Europeans (especially those of us without European heritage) less sympathetic to European pleas of support, yet it's your politicians that try to sign a defense pacts with "third world countries" like India [0]
It's because of agriculture and us here in Europe losing our food-related resilience because of that. The tertiary sector won't save you in case of a continental blockade and the Argentinian/Brazilian grain suddenly becoming unavailable. "We'll go back to our farmers here in Europe!" Oops, you've just pushed them into bankruptcy a few years ago as a result of Mercosur, so good luck with that.
What happens to bankrupt farms? Are they converted into national forests?
Probably real estate. You also lose the tools, and the people, and the know-how.
Well that doesn’t seem to matter in another areas of the economy… meanwhile in Germany we are experiencing an historical de-industrialization. I don’t see nearly as much fuss about that.
The amount of erosion and heavy use of fertilizer doesn’t seem so good in the long run.
Are you talking about Argentina or France?
Wait... did I change thread or what... wasn't the discussion about EU / Mercosur? Why do you pick these 2 countries?
Can someone explain what he is actually suggesting? What $300B he is talking about, and on what it will be invested in instead.
Also why is he wearing sunglasses?
I think $300B is about everything. Pension funds, investment, military spending etc.
The glasses are due to eye redness.
Funny that of all people, Macron says that. Just a few months back, France government bonds lost their AAA rating because Macron refuses to pass legislative reforms. All while the EU biggest powerhouse economy - Germany - has remained stagnant or is even shrinking. Good luck convincing investors to not buy US bonds with that outlook.
So no more MSCI World in Europe?
Individual investors can buy whatever they want. The idea is to be competitive with the US, so that indices like MSCI World are more than just thinly-veiled S&P500 indices.
So, how is this going to work? Is he talking about the French Ministry of Economics and Finance? About the Banque de France? About the the ECB? Afaik the last two are, nominally at least, independent, while Macron is just a politician representing one of the 27 EU countries, so what authority does he have? What do the political leaders of Latvia think about this? Or of Malta?
So, the president of a socialist country (a country where the government spenditure is 57% of the total GDP is a socialist country [1]) is now saying their citizens that they will be stopped from investing the little money the state allows them to keep wherever they want, and be forced to invest in their faulty economy.
That’s it, right?
There’s a reason Europeans mostly invest in US stocks: they are much more profitable because the US doesn’t tax to death and regulates to death their own companies. Maybe France and the rest of the EU should try the same.
When will the EU understand that they have the GOAT Paul Graham across the channel in the UK?
Open YCombinator Paris or London: Capital would flow to him.
drop capital gains tax on EU stonks and watch the flight. there are a million ways they could make this attractive
> drop capital gains tax on EU stonks
Right, because it's not like France already has a large primary deficit or anything.
confused sounds in voiced glottal fricative What capital gains tax?
In general those things work pretty bad. Then someone will just make an EU company that owns US shares to do a tax arbitrage.
If you are rich enough, it isn’t rocket science to avoid capital gains taxes in the EU. And by rich enough, just a few hundred K. (See the related FIRE Reddit boards)
Macron is making up numbers. Unless the EU member states actually impose capital controls, investors will continue to send their capital wherever it can earn the highest returns. Profitable investment opportunities in the EU remain slim and so far they seem uninterested in pursuing a growth policy.
Politics drives decision making in addition to just seeking returns, especially for government affiliated funds, e.g.:
https://www.reuters.com/business/swedish-pension-fund-alecta...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/danish-pension-fund-treasuries-...
(And remember that India and China combined reduced their holdings of US treasures by at least $50B in 2025: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/amid-global-... )
Canadian tourism visits to the US have dropped massively in the last year, not because Canadian tourist spots are better or more fun now (e.g. pure market forces), but again because of politics:
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20251211-where-are-all-th...
The EU has $8T invested in US assets. That's not an easy choice like a soccer mom choosing to go to the Caribbean instead of Florida for a weekend. It's very serious business that needs real alternatives.
As long as they lose less than they lose by keeping it in $ they're coming out ahead.
They don’t have a choice, they sell they get back dollars. What are they going to swap 8 trillion dollars into? And an even better question how?
$8 trillion is about half the M3 of the Euro.
In fact there are only about 20 trillion dollars right now, there isn’t even enough liquidity to cash out.
You definitely cannot do it all at once, all you can do is what China and India are doing, which is to slowly sell US treasuries over many years. China used to hold $1.3T of US treasuries but they now only hold just under $0.7T, thus about half has been sold. India similarly has reduced their holdings from $240B to $190 over the last year. It can be done, just not quickly.
Stocks generally survive currency devaluations, but treasuries do not. So I am not a fan of treasuries in this environment, but US stocks should be fairly resistant except for their dependency on the US economy, which could be disrupted in a currency devaluation.
For one, they can stop feeding Microsoft and other American conglomerates and develop Free Software alternatives.
Ok, but that doesn’t answer the question how do you cash out on $8 trillion dollars and convert them into another currency.
India and China are buying gold: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/india-and-china-move.... Good time to be a gold bug.
How much do EU government run funds invest in the US?
The governments can quiet easily influence private investment decisions by adding additional taxes to us-based market trades for example.
It'd be quiet easy if the EU governments actually wanted to do so - I'm not sure they actually do right now, however.
Contrary to the implication, the Swedish fund that possibly sold $8b of its $100b worth of US Treasuries did not cite politics as its reason for doing so, and no part of the article backs up that claim. Additionally, selling out of the US dollar as the fed aimed to cut rates and as the dollar declined from historic highs against the Euro seems sensible regardless of politics.
Denmark has been exiting foreign bonds for 10 years, down from a high of $24b in 2016 to $10b in 2025. It’s not only part of a trend, but the cited $100m of bonds sold makes up a negligible 0.00026% of US treasuries.
On that note, 1 USD buys nearly $1.40 CAD.
Politics makes it easy to write stories that paint an incomplete or incorrect picture.
To be fair, the Swedish pension fund specifically cited the US's "large budget deficits and growing government debt" for why they saw it as higher risk. That sort of thing is 100% politicians.
https://www.thestandard.com.hk/wealth-and-investment/article...
The cited rationale is a perfectly reasonable take.
But most of the world is in the same boat of "large budget deficits and growing government debt". It will be "interesting" for bond issuers and most investors and "exciting fishing" for hedge fund sharks over the next 10 years or so.
That said, I do not agree that it is 100% politicians. At least in the US, that path has been virtually unavoidable after the fiscal spending by G.W. Bush on the 9/11 wars and fully set in stone after 2008 subprime crisis. For the last 15+ years politicians could slow down or speed up the transit a little, but getting off that train has not been an option. My 2c.
Its worse than you think: The United States is currently experiencing a massive, accelerating debt crisis, with the gross federal debt surpassing $38 trillion as of late 2025.
It is growing by $1 trillion roughly every 82 days.
This debt level, which has exceeded 120% of the U.S. GDP,
To be fair, the US has been growing its federal debt my whole life. It is one of those things that seems unsustainable but then it continues. Of course, it is sustainable because of US dollar dominance in the world and that may be faltering with Trump, especially if the Federal Reserve loses its independence.
Yeah politics or not, the US stock market has a very high exposure to just a couple tech companies, and many of these companies have a very high P/E, and likewise hugely invested in AI (which itself is a risk). Add to that the recent (entirely self-inflicted) geopolitical questions of US reliability, I think it's a smart idea to reduce US exposure in one's portfolio.
Circling back to AI, my (not politically motivated) opinion, is that most of the tremendous supposed value was priced in into AI stock back in 2024, with 2025 gains being either relatively modest or stagnant. With the risks involved, I think it's fair to expect that AI companies can go down a lot, but it's hard to imagine them going up by that much.
Like, for example if NVIDIA gained another $1T in market cap, that'd increase the stock price by 22%, but if they lost that much, it would make it go down by 36%. If we consider both outcomes equally likely (not suggesting this is a reasonable assumption), we're more likely to lose money.
>Contrary to the implication, the Swedish fund that possibly sold $8b of its $100b worth of US Treasuries did not cite politics as its reason for doing so
Which doesn't mean it wasn't the reason.
Maybe it was more because the president is a fool and less because he is a jerk?
> 1 USD buys nearly $1.40 CAD.
Right before Trump (2024), 1.42 CAD at the top. During Trump, barely hits 1.40 CAD, one time it touched 1.37 CAD.
Unfortunately the US Dollar is devaluing. In the past year the dollar went down by 11%. That means SP 500 which has gone up 13% in the past year has only gone up 2% for a European.
It's a matter of perspective, for the US administration, that 11% drop is reason for celebration.
Their goal is to make American blue collar manufacturing jobs viable again, and part of the plan is to make it cheaper for other countries to buy their goods.
It's not the first time the dollar has been intentionally devalued.
The DXY dollar index:
https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/.DXY?qsearchterm=dollar%20index
The big move down happened March-June.
Coincides with major tariff actions by the admin
Not if the European invested in currency hedged vanguard sp500s
This means that from a European point of view, US investments are 11% cheaper.
This could be attractive depending on your view of the future of the US dollar and US stock market.
Well no thanks, the US is going the same path Hungary and Turkey, just with a 10 year difference, autocrats are never good for business.
As soon as Trump came in power I sold all my dollars and I was wise to do it.
Expect things to go much more worse from here, this is only the beginning. For now the FED has relatively been untouched, it's not going to stay pristine forever.
The fact that the EUR/U$S parity did not change much means EUR devaluated about the same, doesn’t it?
EUR/USD increased ~13% in the past year
https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=EUR&to=USD&view=1Y
No the $ devalued against the euro by about 11% in the past 12 months. Look at a chart.
False. Dollar has crashed against Euro.
> Unless the EU member states actually impose capital controls, investors will continue to send their capital wherever it can earn the highest returns.
You don't need to introduce capital controls to make it unattractive to invest in the US. There are plenty of options that the EU could pull that would make investments abroad very unpopular quickly.
Like how…?
By taking inspiration from the US. The US has PFIC for instance and many other reporting requirements that make it more attractive to invest in the US than abroad.
Yea, but how?
The EU can barely get the Mercosur FTA out the door. How can it even attempt to make such a drastic change that would make FDI in the EU less attractive than equally large and equally onerous China?
And that ignores the fact that states like Poland, Ireland, and Czechia would ferociously fight back at anything that threatens their FDI driven economies.
Even Ireland opposed the Anti-Coercion Instrument [0] four days ago, and everyone still remembers Belgium's unilateral opposition to seizing frozen Russian assets barely a month ago.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/be-no-doubt-eu-will-ret...
That Europe is incapable of doing anything bold is a different topic. You don't have to tell me how fundamentally screwed we are because of the consensus issue. But Europe could, without introducing capital controls, implement something. The US did, there is no fundamental reason why Europe could not either.
It's just a question of political will
If something is hypothetically possible but practically impossible, then the mental exercise is a waste of time, and distracts from thinking about an actual solution.
For example, Trump could impeached and removed from office, but that isn't happening. So what's the solution?
I think if people were forced to invest their pensions in shitty EU stocks there would be push back. Also moving public sector pensions into EU stocks won't deliver the growth required, they are already unsustainable.
I exclusively responded to a comment about capital controls, which are even less likely. I'm not particularly interested in a discussion about what politicans might or might not do.
Those are capital controls by another name.
but not necessarily capital controls by a similar legislative difficulty, although at this point it's somewhat abstract what is being discussed.
No idea what this number actually is. If it includes pension funds' investments in the US stock market and US bonds, then it is underestimated.
> investors will continue to send their capital wherever it can earn the highest returns
Maybe. But they're allowed to avoid junk bonds and other "risky investments".
Counter argument: people invest in bonds. Quite a lot of bonds in fact.
Picking up pennies in front of a steam roller and counterparty risk seem to be perennial favorites of youth, but I hazard to guess only a minority in the market have flesh yet untouched by fire.
Yes, but also no.
Pension funds around these parts are big, we are often forced to pay into them. Years ago, I noticed they started advertising green funds. Would not be surprised to see options that exclude the US too.
If you look at Trumps polls across EU countries, it is heavily in the negative and a lot of us are wanting to put our money where our mouth is about it.
> Pension funds around these parts are big
Not really. Most EU countries don’t even have noticeable state pension funds (and one of the biggest culprits is actually France). They just rely on younger people to support the pensions of the retired ones.
You're forgetting about private pension funds. Those are massive, and often mandated by a collective bargaining agreement.
Not in France they aren’t. And not in most EU countries that still rely in pay as you go pension systems.
For comparison. France’s pension funds (total public and private) are 12% of their GDP. Total EU pension funds are also around 20% of total EU GDP. USA pension funds are 170% of their GDP!!!
It's not either-or, necessarily.
Yes, we have a pays-as-you-go pension system in Denmark (sigh). But regulations were also changed a while back such that employees must pay into a pension scheme of their own. In our case, that's handled via your employer and there's a minimum contribution limit and often incentives to pay a higher level.
((not my area of expertise))
Maybe, but so does Trump. And that’s who these figures are really meant for.
I doubt it will make any difference though, because Trump is about as brain damaged as they come.
Indeed it sounds a lot like Trump's bs, so Trump might buy it. It's almost like "those s**hole countries sending is their worst to eat our cats and dogs" or "subsidies we send every year to all over the world".
Similar thing to what the UK did post-Brexit?
Except in a floating exchange rate that isn’t what happens. For somebody to leave the Eurozone for the Dollar zone there has to be somebody coming in the opposite direction to exchange with.
Macron is still talking nonsense of course. The Euros never left in the first place.
> For somebody to leave the Eurozone for the Dollar zone there has to be somebody coming in the opposite direction to exchange with.
Does that mean trade imbalances don’t exist?
> Macron is making up numbers
So is Trump. This is all just response to bullying.
"I got big muscles"
"Oh yeah, I got big muscles too"
This all is happening because America elected a criminal clown, twice.
Let me fix that for you. This is all happening because the institutions in America failed to deliver for working-class people for over four decades, and Americans got fed up, elected a billionaire willing to be a bulldozer of those institutions and the systems that work for knowledge workers, twice.
And how does that work for them?
Fantastic for my knowledge worker 401(k)!
All politicians will say what people want to hear.
American voters elected the people who ran those institutions, or appointed the leaders of those institutions.
I know we all want it to be some shadowy cabal so we can pretend the average person didn't cause this, but it isn't. We did this to ourselves.
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> The only reason the IMF hasn't taken the reins of France yet is because France has the nuclear weapon and is the only country in the eurozone to have it, so they have some leverage with the other countries in the eurozone.
First of all IMF has nothing to do with the Eurozone. And second of all, we are Europeans. We don’t threaten to bomb our neighbors if they don’t give us what we want. That’s just a Russian/American thing.
Only for the past 70 years. Before that europeans were the bomb-lobbing record holders.
Yes, that is true. In the past we were primitive like Russians/Americans.
The EU being our peace project, which both Russia and the US now want to undo.
How many percentage of GDP is healthcare in the US? 10, 20%?
Healthcare is almost entirely public in France (pension also mostly are), so I'm not sure that your comparison makes sense.
Healthcare is about 17% in the US GDP and 30% of the federal budget. The US spends more on public healthcare as a % of GDP than almost all European countries, including France which spends about 12% of GDP on healthcare.
It's hard to get a comparable read since you don't get a clean split in the #s between what would be public spending vs. private spending if the US + a "Medicare for All" type system, but including the % of GDP spent in US on healthcare overall, it would put government expenditures as % of GDP on par with most other countries in the world that do provide universal health care:
* https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/... * https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
France certainly has a higher % of expenditure to GDP than other comparable countries, and you would expect the USA health care to GDP % to decline to be more inline with other countries with universal coverage if a national program was introduced.
However, because France is still offering more public social services and benefits overall vs. a "USA + universal health" that it's hard to make broad claims either way about who is wasting more money or which system is more effective for citizens based purely on % of government expenditure to total GDP.
meanwhile 6-week vacations, high speed trains, walkable cities, generous child benefits, and, well, quality of life salute you from here
All great things for sure. But the French economy has been stagnant for decades. There is no growth. One option would be to allow more immigration, but not allow the immigrants to have access to the public benefits. Obviously that is a divisive political issue they struggle badly with.
> the French economy has been stagnant for decades. There is no growth.
This is one of the biggest reasons why it is trivially easy for USA, China, and Russia to squeeze them (and the whole EU) from all sides.
6 week vacation?
Europe has been on a 30 year vacation, and it's starting to look like that vacation might need to end.
The issue is a lot of French people in the private sector (small businesses, contractors etc.) actually work really hard and often long hours to subsidise public sector employees barely working and retiring at 55.
At the end of the day, that just isn't sustainable politically and it's pretty questionable if it's morally correct either
At some point the money runs out for all of that stuff, it seems that in France that's just about to happen.
One thing I remember from civics class: governments should think in terms of generations; not profits/losses.
That's true, but you have to actually be investing in growth for it to come up. Instead the next generation will get both spiriling interest payments and crumbling infrastructure.
> The only reason the IMF hasn't taken the reins of France yet is because France has the nuclear weapon and is the only country in the eurozone to have it, so they have some leverage with the other countries in the eurozone.
Haha, what? How is France having nuclear weapons leverage over other countries in the Eurozone? What kind of thing do you think the Eurozone or EU even is? We don't use threats of violence against each other in negotiations. France having nuclear weapons or not matters zilch in these conversations, because we're all allies.
> Haha, what? How is France having nuclear weapons leverage over other countries in the Eurozone? What kind of thing do you think the Eurozone or EU even is? We don't use threats of violence against each other in negotiations. France having nuclear weapons or not matters zilch in these conversations, because we're all allies.
Greece says hello!
... did I miss something? I know there is plenty of financial and institutional coercion, don't get me wrong, but violent threats between nations within the Eurozone? When did that happen / what are you referencing?
Well they're right: The IMF routinely takes over countries that have too much debt, but it hasn't done this to France.
The IMF usually only gets involved in policy when countries borrow money from them. So far, France has not had to request such aid.
Which ones?
I took it to mean more that europe relies on France for nuclear deterrence against outside threats so treats them with gentle gloves more than Europe is afraid of France nuking them. Right now more than ever they really need someone with nukes on their side.
> I took it to mean more that europe relies on France for nuclear deterrence against outside threats
Yeah, that tracks, re-reading with that interpretation makes it make a whole lot more sense than what I understood at first reading. Thanks a lot for helping me understanding it better!
> How is France having nuclear weapons leverage over other countries in the Eurozone?
If there's one thing a bank is scared of, it's getting nuked. /s
Isn't the US running a deficit of 5.8% of their GDP as well?
I think the issue here is that France can't print more euros to cover it, other countries have to cover it since they share currency they are all responsible for the debt
TIL EU savings rate is far more than US. 18.79% vs 3.50%
Guessing that's somehow counting enforced deductions off paycheques. Would be a wild difference if not.
https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/personal-savings
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/personal-savings
Even the poorest EU countries are actually surprisingly wealthy.
Bulgaria was switching to Euro on the new year’s eve and the easiest way to convert Leva to Euro was to put the money into the bank, so Bulgarian deposits reached 100B+ levas into personal accounts by November which converts to ~50B+ Euros. Which is over 10K Euros per Bulgarian adult. Not bad for the poorest country, considering that home ownership rate is also very high(%86 IIRC).
The life is pretty good for a GDP per capita of $18K.
Home ownership can be a deceptive stat in Eastern Europe - many people don't register their address at the place they rent - in part because they're renting it under the table.
Tons of folks also live with their parents into their 30s.
Those numbers are quite off. The total amount of Leva in circulation at the end of 2024 was round 30B. End of November 2025 in circulation around 23B.
Here’s a source: https://sofiaglobe.com/2025/12/23/on-the-eve-of-the-euro-zon...
By the mid January %58 of the leva were removed from circulation BTW.
Total deposits in the bank accounts sure. I understood it as they deposited 100B of their cash into their bank accounts by November.
fair, edited for clarification
The Europeans I know seem to save in actual bank savings accounts, whereas the Americans I know seem to invest their money. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough, but I can't find a description of "savings" on those charts. To me, they are both types of investment, one a super safe option with a low return, and the other a more risky option with a higher return.
From that Draghi paper a year ago or so, I believe part of Europe's innovation problem seems to stem from a lack of private investment by individuals in this way, so that would also align with this different philosophy on dealing with savings.
There's no "enforced savings" that I know of in Europe.
3.50% in the US sounds extremely low to me. It has fallen a bit recently but the savings rate was about 25% in France in 2020. Common knowledge says to strive to save at the very least 10% of one's revenue around here.
It seems like savings include pension ([1], but it is a bit unclear to me) , and that is a kind of forced saving (as in many places in Europe you can't choose to not get pension and get it as cash to spend instead).
1: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
It's not clear to me either, but as I understand it it doesn't include pensions because social contributions are not part of "disposable income".
I think that "the net adjustment for change in pension entitlements" is there to take into account the expected reduced future income from pension entitlements dwindling over time (edit: in effect, making pensions count as negative savings) somehow, but it's unclear.
I looked for another perspective but the French national bank doesn't mention pensions in its explanations[0].
[0] https://www.banque-france.fr/system/files/2024-08/epargne-de...
Sounds like they don’t count that. They seem to only count disposable income and payments the company does to your retirement aren’t really disposable
The UK has "enforced savings" in the form of auto-enrollment pensions for over 10 years. Looks like Ireland is just starting to do it too.
That's mostly to prepare teenagers at the time for having no state pension in 50 years.
I have about seven of the buggers and I'm only in my mid 30s.....
Pensions or teenagers?
There is a very large and growing portion of the US that maintains no savings at all. In fact it's the opposite and many are slowly spending their way into perpetual credit card debt.
It's essential to the way the system works. One person's money is another person's debt. Normally the government would take on enough debt to ensure everyone had money, but the USA is a weird case.
According to some sources, 1 in 4 Americans don't/can't save at all.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/13/economy/job-prices-debt-e...
In the US people take on personal debt for something like a car. In the Netherlands (where I live) this is very uncommon: people save up, then buy it.
Our public transportation infrastructure is so badly managed that many jobs will ask you if you have reliable transportation and fire you if you find yourself without it. If your car breaks here it's often not really a option to save up for a bit first.
Part of "freedom", yes?
Also helps that most people don't start with an extremely large student loan when they have finished their education.
I'd argue accumulating too much wealth compared to your salary can be a bad thing - for example, real estate compared to salary is even more expensive in Europe than the US - so the extra money doesn't go anywhere useful, you just get to pay more for the same stuff.
Also, if the US person pays less taxes, but has to pay for a bunch of services that the EU person would get for free, that means the US person has a lower savings rate, even though they're paying for the exact same stuff.
Retirement accounts are more like social security than 401k. There’s no set amount of euros set aside for me it’s all in the pool paying for older peoples retirement
This doesn't surprise me at all as an European. My mind struggles to understand how so many Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
And yet there's no lack of demand for US investments, because they're attractive to foreign investors. (This is the flip side of trade deficits.)
I wonder how much of EU savings is invested in foreign countries?
The US can always print more money to fund its institutions, but other countries have to save theirs. Sure, they can print more euro but when so much stuff they need is traded in USD, that's not nearly as effective as when the US prints more USD.
> The US can always print more money to fund its institutions, but other countries have to save theirs.
That only works if there are takers for US bonds otherwise all this will do is devalue the USD.
If like me you are wondering why the sunglasses, it looks like he is using that to mask an eye infection.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-emman...
Probably just a broken blood vessel in the eye.
There once was a lady in France,
Whose right fist struck as if by chance;
“Just an eye infection, come on!”Is this a really bad attempt at a Limerick or some other form I'm not familiar with?
Related:
> Savings and investments union
https://finance.ec.europa.eu/regulation-and-supervision/savi...
The EU can’t even get a Mercosur deal closed after 30 years. I think this will probably happen in another 60 years.
I thought Americans today are pro-tariffs and against free trade? US is still unable to get a free trade deal with mercosur.
OP isn't American.
It's hard to overstate how much a beating the EU's reputation took after the Mercosur fiasco.
Lula took a massive political risk to push the EU-Mercosur FTA despite the power behind the throne in Brazil being wooed/bribed by the Trump admin [0] and already on the fence about the EU-Mercosur FTA because they are Ag Barons that primarily trade with the US and China [1] AND during a hotly contested election year.
This only makes the EU look like a less attractive negotiating partner, and incentivizes countries to unilaterally negotiate with individual EU states instead of the EU as a whole, thus undermining the entire EU.
If the EU alienates China, the US, Russia, Brazil, India, ASEAN, Japan, Korea, etc who else is left?
That is the whole crux of Carney and Zelenskyy's speeches at Davos.
> US is still unable to get a free trade deal with mercosur
Instead, we get an REE extraction deal in Brazil [2], financial backing for our current Venezuela escapade [0], and a president exporting Hispanic American-style far right politics into EU member states like Spain [3] and Italy [4] where right-leaning South Americans have become a major political voting bloc.
The more isolated the EU becomes, the easier it is for countries to begin taking advantage of European nations on their terms.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-18/brazil-s-...
[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/d293237e-e39f-4f4c-89e7-4c52cf937...
[2] - https://www.ft.com/content/401a9e84-3034-4375-bf39-56b92500c...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/spains-far-right-vox-ho...
[4] - https://cebri.org/revista/en/artigo/172/javier-milei-and-the...
What makes it more ridiculous, is that fact that we from the EU are shouting US is getting isolated, but some of the biggest economies in the world do not want to trade with 4 countries from the 3rd world, because we think will get bankrupt because of that.
I'm sure everyone would be happy to purchase stuff that respect our own standards. We forbid our farmers to use some chemicals because they are bad for health and nature, it would be completely stupid to start purchasing food abroad that is made using those chemicals, don't you agree?
Sorry, the standards imposed to meat from south america is way higher than the European. Wine is nearly impossible. And spicies like paprika also require higher standards than in Europe. I don’t know what you mean with that. Free trade does not mean there are no standards to met. Same standards will be imposed (as are already imposed) to anything imported in the EU. Also in south America, because of size you don’t need nearly as much chemicals as in EU anyway.
Last but not least, that of quality standards and chemicals doesn’t hold anyway, as there are already loads of products coming from those countries already… I look always where things come from, and fruits come up to 80% from South America (including Mercosur). Dang even apples from Argentina in Germany, which is frankly non sense to me! It’s just not about quality, is good all protectionism and imposing tariffs, just as Trump is doing, but if we do, is ok.
Yes, I agree with the standards, but has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with the agreement Mercosur/EU. The standard will be imposed for ANY product sold in the EU, doesn't matter where it comes from, as it should be.
Do you have sources for what you say for meat for example? From what I could read on this topic, they don't have the same traceability constraints, may use growth hormones that are forbidden here, etc.
To add to the absurdity, one of the thing we Europeans will be able to export more to SA is chemicals, including those which we forbid here because they damage health and environment...
> but some of the biggest economies in the world do not want to trade with 4 countries from the 3rd world,
It's this attitude that makes non-Europeans (especially those of us without European heritage) less sympathetic to European pleas of support, yet it's your politicians that try to sign a defense pacts with "third world countries" like India [0]
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/eu-proceed-security-defe...
*We = farmers, their lobby, and their simps.
It's because of agriculture and us here in Europe losing our food-related resilience because of that. The tertiary sector won't save you in case of a continental blockade and the Argentinian/Brazilian grain suddenly becoming unavailable. "We'll go back to our farmers here in Europe!" Oops, you've just pushed them into bankruptcy a few years ago as a result of Mercosur, so good luck with that.
What happens to bankrupt farms? Are they converted into national forests?
Probably real estate. You also lose the tools, and the people, and the know-how.
Well that doesn’t seem to matter in another areas of the economy… meanwhile in Germany we are experiencing an historical de-industrialization. I don’t see nearly as much fuss about that.
The amount of erosion and heavy use of fertilizer doesn’t seem so good in the long run.
Are you talking about Argentina or France?
Wait... did I change thread or what... wasn't the discussion about EU / Mercosur? Why do you pick these 2 countries?
Can someone explain what he is actually suggesting? What $300B he is talking about, and on what it will be invested in instead.
Also why is he wearing sunglasses?
I think $300B is about everything. Pension funds, investment, military spending etc.
The glasses are due to eye redness.
Funny that of all people, Macron says that. Just a few months back, France government bonds lost their AAA rating because Macron refuses to pass legislative reforms. All while the EU biggest powerhouse economy - Germany - has remained stagnant or is even shrinking. Good luck convincing investors to not buy US bonds with that outlook.
So no more MSCI World in Europe?
Individual investors can buy whatever they want. The idea is to be competitive with the US, so that indices like MSCI World are more than just thinly-veiled S&P500 indices.
So, how is this going to work? Is he talking about the French Ministry of Economics and Finance? About the Banque de France? About the the ECB? Afaik the last two are, nominally at least, independent, while Macron is just a politician representing one of the 27 EU countries, so what authority does he have? What do the political leaders of Latvia think about this? Or of Malta?
Please update the link to https://streamable.com/m4dejv or the transcript of the entire speech https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-a...
https://streamable.com/m4dejv
Love that MEGA acronym someone dropped in the comments. I need a blue hat with a golden MEGA lettering embroided.
Foor shure
For those unaware of the context, there's a banger tweet: https://x.com/neilzegh/status/2013679440362975315
Have you tried Reddit?
So, the president of a socialist country (a country where the government spenditure is 57% of the total GDP is a socialist country [1]) is now saying their citizens that they will be stopped from investing the little money the state allows them to keep wherever they want, and be forced to invest in their faulty economy.
That’s it, right?
There’s a reason Europeans mostly invest in US stocks: they are much more profitable because the US doesn’t tax to death and regulates to death their own companies. Maybe France and the rest of the EU should try the same.
[1] https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/2381414
When will the EU understand that they have the GOAT Paul Graham across the channel in the UK?
Open YCombinator Paris or London: Capital would flow to him.
drop capital gains tax on EU stonks and watch the flight. there are a million ways they could make this attractive
> drop capital gains tax on EU stonks
Right, because it's not like France already has a large primary deficit or anything.
confused sounds in voiced glottal fricative What capital gains tax?
In general those things work pretty bad. Then someone will just make an EU company that owns US shares to do a tax arbitrage.
If you are rich enough, it isn’t rocket science to avoid capital gains taxes in the EU. And by rich enough, just a few hundred K. (See the related FIRE Reddit boards)
PG is obsolete.