At the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, President Trump switched gears Wednesday and said he doesn’t want to use force to acquire Greenland. But he left a lot of questions unanswered, too.

Europe has been thinking about a whole bunch of ways that it might be able to retaliate against American aggression, including, potentially, selling off some of the trillions of dollars worth of U.S. Treasurys held by Europe’s central banks and its private sector.

Europeans own at least $8 trillion worth of U.S. Treasurys. Selling them off would make it harder and more expensive for the U.S. to borrow money to fund all its spending.

There is, however, a problem.

“These assets are not help predominately by European governments, they’re held by private investors,” said Josh Lipsky, international economics chair at the Atlantic Council.

He said European governments don’t have a quick way of forcing private investors to sell their Treasurys. 

Then, there’s another, minor issue.

“It would not be in Europe’s own economic interest to do something like this,” said Daniel McDowell, a political science and international affairs professor at Syracuse University.

U.S. Treasurys back a lot of financial instruments around the world.

“Any mass sale of Treasurys like that would likely cause severe disruptions that not only impact the U.S., it would also impact European banks and the entire global economy,” McDowell said.

And, on top of that, a lot of Europeans would lose a lot of money because it’d basically be a mega-flash sale of U.S. Treasurys.

“When everybody is going through the exit door at the same time, it’s impossible to get out and you’re gonna have to lose a lot in value if you’re trying to all sell at the same time,” said Luis Alvarado, global fixed income strategist at the Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

Plus, this would mess with currency markets — make the Euro appreciate and European goods more expensive. 

But on the other hand, money isn’t everything.

“I think we’re well past the point where considerations have to be only a financial and economic nature without consideration of national security,” said Nicolas Veron, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

So let’s say Europe did decide to burn it all down and force a sell off of Treasurys. Where would it put all that money?

There isn’t an alternative, said McDowell at Syracuse.

“There’s no other market capable of absorbing that much capital in a short time without major disruptions,” he said.

And if European investors, like all investors, want to be where the money is? That leads right back to the U.S.

“The U.S. is the center of AI, we have superior growth track, superior productivity,” said John Canally, chief portfolio strategist at TIAA Wealth Management.

There are lots of other pain points Europe could hit before selling off Treasurys — tariffs, going after U.S. tech companies. So an official move to unload U.S. debt looks unlikely.

What we might see though, said the Atlantic Council’s Josh Lipsky, is an unofficial, gradual, organic backing away from that debt.

“There is a move out there and I think it was already underway before what happened in the past week, to find alternatives to diversify your portfolio,” he said.

Not a wave or a catastrophe, just a gradual waning of U.S. financial importance.

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