I suppose it could turn very bearish in the next few years?
Something always occurs to me whenever I think about climate change. I think, "What is prosperity?" and the answers are mainly centered on stability and security. Not "stock market" stability, or "national security" but...
Weather stability (floods, droughts, severe storms that lead to crop loss or yield reduction, wildfires, power outages and destruction).
Food and energy security (crop loss or low yields leading to scarcity, food / gas / electric price increases etc)
When I think about my family I think: first priority is to guarantee shelter, food and basic comforts. Everything after that is important of course, but without those three things, it all tastes like ashes. I can't pretend to be happy without stability.
We can pretend that AI and GoogleAds are a great way to measure "prosperity" but in reality, if there's a threat to the basics, we can't pretend to be prosperous. "Value" can be destroyed very quickly when the foundations are gone.
I don't have any more detail than that. I'm a lowly infrastructure engineer. I don't go any deeper than those shower thoughts.
But is Europe looking at the state of the world and pulling it's reserves closer-to?
and it's going to be like that for decades unless in like november or so there's a broad sweep of offices and the other party actually exercises power for once and prosecutes politicians criminal behavior instead of that infuriating clemency nonsense they always do.
I'm betting they'll get elected and then sit on their hands as hard as possible, fight their constituency, insist on doing absolutely nothing, and then get kicked right back out 2 years later.
Also to note, why was the US trusted before? I think it's a heritage from the Marshall plan: The US saved us twice from Germany, therefore we owe them our nations and storing our gold there won't change much. A century later, it does.
I'd rephrase the question as: Would you trust your parents? In childhood years probably, because you owe them your education anyway.
I think you should look up the Morgenthau plan and look at the state of Germany today. Of course people will say that it's all because of Germany's own decisions. To which I would counter that Germany doesn't any sovereign decisions and the last time it did that was in 2011.
This isnt the first time European powers repatriated gold from the US. In 1971 France sent their navy to take their gold back because of another conservative US leader who decided to try and leverage our power at the expense of international trust and lost us a portion of said power[1].
I am an American. I preferred when we were stronger because we sweetened the deal enough with everyone else that they let us be world financier/police/anti piracy force/etc.
This fucking machismo theory taking over the older conservatives and the "The Torment Nexus was actually an awesome idea" taking over the tech bros and younger conservatives is fucking destroying us. Both groups seem incapable of believing in a win/win deal. Its also zero sum game to these fuckers and thus our soft power, and eventually our hard power, is being lost.
I think its eventually in that if we put our might behind it we could take probably any 2-3 major military powers on the planet at the current moment, but that's with the caveat that putting our might behind it means tens to hundreds of thousands of dead military members which we as a nation have lost the stomach for.
I am saying eventually in that I think we will not even be able to do that if we found our grit again in the coming years as long as we are prioritizing raising testosterone in individual soldiers and removing qualified women and minorities from our military over having competent leaders and prioritizing logistics.
1. In Iran alone, the US has depleted stocks of some of its most advanced and important weapons systems.
2. The US does not have the manufacturing capacity for an extended conflict (China does) and the US is in fact dependent on Chinese components and raw materials.
3. As it relates to a China contingency in the Taiwan Strait: the Strait is ~140 miles at its widest point, and the Chinese have spent 20+ years investing in A2/AD capabilities. Given the state of the US military right now, it's hard to see how the US could overcome China's geographic advantage.
4. Our most important allies don't trust us (and we're even threatening some of them) so don't expect them to help.
5. Some of the most experienced and competent military leaders have been pushed out by an unqualified alcoholic who is more interested in how many pushups the cannon fodder can do than he is in how many ships America can build.
Russia had assets in Europe, look what happened to those. We got so naive and relaxed in the abscense of big wars within the "western hemisphere" that some people geniunly forgot what will happen to all of their "assets" when shit hit the fan.
I put my gold in the safe of my best friend, he has a good safe. Then I rapped and killed his wife and children, and destroyed his house. But he doesn’t want to give me the gold back.
Does anyone in power anywhere actually think China has finally overtaken the US hegemony? Or are we pretending someone else might somehow hold that position?
China is making trade deals and integration left and right and even Canada and Mexico are looking in other directions and cooperate more closely with china and eu. Maybe not a single power has to hold power
Most of the major Bitcoin spikes and leveling-up of the price since 2012 have preceded or corresponded with governments tightening controls, and people using BTC they owned or buying it to evacuate capital to more lightly regulated countries. That's also why there hasn't been a Bitcoin rush for awhile, imho... it's no longer very useful for that, now that all the entrance and exit nodes are monitored. Gold is a bit hard to move, but this article may be underselling to what extent the recent spike in gold prices is attributable to demand for that kind of liquidity. The cross-border, anonymous kind.
The demise of Localbitcoins actual local meetups and trading for cash was the end of a significant way to move money out of regimes that people suspected were going to take it from them.
Sure, and you can replace US with almost any country in that sentence. The problem right now is there's a feeling that even decades-old alliances are no longer something you can count on when you're talking about the US.
I have seen moldy produce all over the GTA here in Canada lately. The homeless situation in Hamilton Ontario is getting out of control.
The province posted a billboard the other day around the corner of my house showing some woman "protecting her community against encampments" (aka homeless people).
There are hoards of homeless people that live in the woods just around the corner of this billboard.
It didn't last 3 days.
Neither did the one they put up after it.
Neither did the non-encampment-scare-mongering-one they put up after it.
The homeless or whoever kept destroying it visually with paint/etc.
It advertises TSN sports now.
And I live in a "nice part of town". East hamilton is another planet. Children stabbing children over bicycles. Children shooting random passerbys. [0] Etc. It's bad.
He’s just one part of the explanation, it’s also all the people who are behind him. He’s mostly a front nowadays. If Trump is gone, things wouldn’t be better with Vance taking his place
It’s the voters that put him back. You could say it was an aberration the first time but the second? Americans are too stupid and selfish to be trusted with the immense power they were given.
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
It's a remnant of the cold war and the two preceding hot wars. The plan was to ship big parts of the gold overseas, just in case Europe gets nuked and occupied in a ground invasion from the east. But lately there have been more threats for an invasion from the west, so gold goes back.
Gosh, have we in the West forgotten so much of our history already?
Much of the gold was spirited out of Europe prior to and during WWI. Throughout the war, European countries bought massive amounts of materiel from America, which increased the flow of money out of European and into American coffers.
But gold itself is very heavy and thus cumbersome to transport. It doesn't make sense to run transatlantic gold shipments every time a few bars change hands. So central banks tended to keep the gold more or less in one big vault and just sort of move the bricks between one country's pile and another. So there would be, in essence, a large stack of gold in the US Federal Reserve, and that gold belonged to France, or whomever. When the war ended, European countries were devastated and needed goods from somewhere that didn't have depleted industrial capacity and whose farmlands weren't littered with UXO.
This situation more or less cemented America's position as the world's creditor, and so it simply was more convenient to keep a large portion of one's gold reserves in the country with whom you were doing a lot of business.
Now that Americans have decided they like being a military, economic, and cultural superpower less than they like electing a dementia-ridden child rapist, other countries have correctly realized that America's decline cannot be stopped, only slowed. After all, it's Americans themselves who are the root of the problem, and Trump is but a symptom. This instability is not going to stop when he leaves office. Better get your gold off the sinking ship, but do it slowly so as to not accelerate the sinking before you can get it all out.
Re: the gold situation after WWI, if you're interested I encourage you to read Liaquat Ahamed's excelled Lords of Finance, which won the Pulitzer, IIRC.
The dangerous situation we are in is that entities outside of the USA hold significantly more US assets than US entities own assets outside the USA.
So if the USA declares "ownership be damned", it would be a net win for the USA.
Or in simpler terms: The USA has been giving out IOUs for real goods for decades. It is now tempting to default on those IOUs. The USA did this before. Up until 1971, a dollar certified a claim to gold. Then the USA simply canceled that promise.
The current ramp up to AI dominance might be what holds the USA back from breaking more ties with the world. It is a race that must be won. And investments from abroad help. But when the whole world is operated by US AI factories things might look different. When every task around the world is performed by intelligence generated in the USA, just like every computer is run by US software now - there might be little incentive left to "pay the rent" for the rest of the world that now sits around idle, fiddling their thumbs.
> The dangerous situation we are in is that entities outside of the USA hold way more US assets than US entities own assets outside the USA.
The dangerous situation we are in is that the US is berating and betraying its closest historical allies, eroding its credibility and soft power, and weakening its leverage at a time when threats to the Western order that has existed since the end of WW2 are growing rapidly.
Incidentally, the orange man in charge loves to tout "deals" in which foreign countries agree to invest substantial sums in the US, so any actions that lead foreign countries to believe their investments might be nationalized banana republic-style won't help the administration's efforts to attract investment and onshoring.
It's not going to be a net win for anyone. A country that needs to keep borrowing to stay afloat is not going to improve its position by effectively defaulting on its debt, regardless of the exact method or type of assets involved.
yes. but most of it is not to other countries. Most government debt (over 80% globally) is privately owned through sovereign debt instruments like bonds.
I’d be really interested to see all European countries & Canada dump their US bonds en mass if trump does anything untoward in Greenland, Canada or elsewhere.
As an American trying to retain my sanity in this country, I have to tell myself that such things are just trollish nonsense from the ultimate reality television troll. It is comforting to me that 50% of what he says is bluster and the other 50% is pure fabrication. I think we have developed some resistance to it where, like, a few years ago we would say "OH MY GOD! HE CAN'T POSSIBLY BE THREATENING CANADA!" and now we're just like, "there goes crazy old man again, don't worry, he just shit his pants on the golf course".
Not saying it's right or sound that he's the elected leader of the country or that our politics is so warped... I mean, I blame it on being on the losing end of the most rigorously fought information war in history.
But I believe you can relax, because this is all nonsense.
FWIW, the American people can't even support a war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has been blowing up our soldiers for decades. Hard to imagine they'd show much support for invading an ally.
> But I believe you can relax, because this is all nonsense.
Sorry, but no.
Even if there are no kinetic attacks towards allies right now, the "crazy old man" is causing real harm. Harm to global stability and the world order, economies, to businesses and individuals, to long term initiatives such as research and healthcare.
But most importantly, real harm to the trust between ourselves. Western allies can no longer trust the USA, it is broken, we no longer have the same values.
The first time in 2016 we forgave, everyone makes mistakes and Europe is certainly not free of them. But the American people chose to elect him twice with full knowledge, now everyone suffers.
So the rest of the world forges its own path now.
America's military, economic and cultural hegemony will decline. Not tomorrow, maybe not even quickly, but inevitably. Godspeed !
I bought that initially, but Trump is causing real harm. The abandonment of WHO and USAid programs, stepping out of the paris accords etc. etc.
But the real issue is that he has been elected twice, it is not some one-off freak accident, a lot of americans just care more about transphobia or pizzagate than climate change or geopolitics and thats why its now clear to the rest of the world that we can’t trust the US any more.
Except that “crazy old man” (I’d have gone with corrupt criminal malignant narcissist to be honest) isn’t just shouting at pigeons in the park he already screwed up the world economy by staring a war he can’t figure out how to exit and dozens of other things.
When the pigeon shouter threatens to annex Canada/Greenland you can shrug it off, when the leader of the largest economy and military says it, you can’t.
Words matter.
I’m British, We are often regarded as one of the US’s closest allies, I’m fucking furious with Trump and the people who support him, I’ve been boycotting everything US made that I can and I essentially see the current US as a globally destabilising force.
Are there decent Americans appalled by what they’ve become, sure, doesn’t make a difference to the outcome though either.
Well, who knows? The trajectory has been set in and it is downwards. After Nero and the year of the four emperors the Roman Empire still had ways to go. So, I would say also the US can potentially recover. On the other hand the saying 'it cannot possibly get worse than this' has also been disproven may times in history. In any case, I like to sum it all up by saying "The US is a superpower attempting to become a third world country".
lol, we(america) were the ones who fucked with the gold standard and had the system collapse due to lack of trust in the first place[1]
Please explain your logic behind the idea that European countries needed to have adopted the gold standard that the US unilaterally changed the rules on, to be independent from the US.
Something always occurs to me whenever I think about climate change. I think, "What is prosperity?" and the answers are mainly centered on stability and security. Not "stock market" stability, or "national security" but...
Weather stability (floods, droughts, severe storms that lead to crop loss or yield reduction, wildfires, power outages and destruction).
Food and energy security (crop loss or low yields leading to scarcity, food / gas / electric price increases etc)
When I think about my family I think: first priority is to guarantee shelter, food and basic comforts. Everything after that is important of course, but without those three things, it all tastes like ashes. I can't pretend to be happy without stability.
We can pretend that AI and GoogleAds are a great way to measure "prosperity" but in reality, if there's a threat to the basics, we can't pretend to be prosperous. "Value" can be destroyed very quickly when the foundations are gone.
I don't have any more detail than that. I'm a lowly infrastructure engineer. I don't go any deeper than those shower thoughts.
But is Europe looking at the state of the world and pulling it's reserves closer-to?
At this point international trust in the USA is at around the same level as trust in Iran and Russia .
China handily beats the USA in the trust rankings in most of the world.
I'm betting they'll get elected and then sit on their hands as hard as possible, fight their constituency, insist on doing absolutely nothing, and then get kicked right back out 2 years later.
Also to note, why was the US trusted before? I think it's a heritage from the Marshall plan: The US saved us twice from Germany, therefore we owe them our nations and storing our gold there won't change much. A century later, it does.
I'd rephrase the question as: Would you trust your parents? In childhood years probably, because you owe them your education anyway.
This isnt the first time European powers repatriated gold from the US. In 1971 France sent their navy to take their gold back because of another conservative US leader who decided to try and leverage our power at the expense of international trust and lost us a portion of said power[1].
I am an American. I preferred when we were stronger because we sweetened the deal enough with everyone else that they let us be world financier/police/anti piracy force/etc.
This fucking machismo theory taking over the older conservatives and the "The Torment Nexus was actually an awesome idea" taking over the tech bros and younger conservatives is fucking destroying us. Both groups seem incapable of believing in a win/win deal. Its also zero sum game to these fuckers and thus our soft power, and eventually our hard power, is being lost.
[1]https://www.helleniscope.com/2025/07/31/august-1971-the-day-...
Iran has exposed many limitations and weaknesses in America's defense capabilities, and it's a fraction of the threat China is.
We have 0 carrier strike groups in the Indo-Pacific right now.
I am saying eventually in that I think we will not even be able to do that if we found our grit again in the coming years as long as we are prioritizing raising testosterone in individual soldiers and removing qualified women and minorities from our military over having competent leaders and prioritizing logistics.
1. In Iran alone, the US has depleted stocks of some of its most advanced and important weapons systems.
2. The US does not have the manufacturing capacity for an extended conflict (China does) and the US is in fact dependent on Chinese components and raw materials.
3. As it relates to a China contingency in the Taiwan Strait: the Strait is ~140 miles at its widest point, and the Chinese have spent 20+ years investing in A2/AD capabilities. Given the state of the US military right now, it's hard to see how the US could overcome China's geographic advantage.
4. Our most important allies don't trust us (and we're even threatening some of them) so don't expect them to help.
5. Some of the most experienced and competent military leaders have been pushed out by an unqualified alcoholic who is more interested in how many pushups the cannon fodder can do than he is in how many ships America can build.
And miscalculations in game theory happen ("he wouldn't, given...").
Well. Not sure. Untrustable system, maybe. (The whole chain that brought to this stage is improper - and the damaging factors are still active.)
Yes, China is a likely eventual successor and in some parts is the world has replaced the US in being the influential superpower.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTtf5s2HFkA
The demise of Localbitcoins actual local meetups and trading for cash was the end of a significant way to move money out of regimes that people suspected were going to take it from them.
We can't even keep fresh food on our shelves https://trends.google.com/explore?q=moldy%20food&date=all&ge...
I have seen moldy produce all over the GTA here in Canada lately. The homeless situation in Hamilton Ontario is getting out of control.
The province posted a billboard the other day around the corner of my house showing some woman "protecting her community against encampments" (aka homeless people).
There are hoards of homeless people that live in the woods just around the corner of this billboard.
It didn't last 3 days.
Neither did the one they put up after it.
Neither did the non-encampment-scare-mongering-one they put up after it.
The homeless or whoever kept destroying it visually with paint/etc.
It advertises TSN sports now.
And I live in a "nice part of town". East hamilton is another planet. Children stabbing children over bicycles. Children shooting random passerbys. [0] Etc. It's bad.
[0] https://hamiltonpolice.on.ca/news/sarkodie-homicide-suspect-...
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
Much of the gold was spirited out of Europe prior to and during WWI. Throughout the war, European countries bought massive amounts of materiel from America, which increased the flow of money out of European and into American coffers.
But gold itself is very heavy and thus cumbersome to transport. It doesn't make sense to run transatlantic gold shipments every time a few bars change hands. So central banks tended to keep the gold more or less in one big vault and just sort of move the bricks between one country's pile and another. So there would be, in essence, a large stack of gold in the US Federal Reserve, and that gold belonged to France, or whomever. When the war ended, European countries were devastated and needed goods from somewhere that didn't have depleted industrial capacity and whose farmlands weren't littered with UXO.
This situation more or less cemented America's position as the world's creditor, and so it simply was more convenient to keep a large portion of one's gold reserves in the country with whom you were doing a lot of business.
Now that Americans have decided they like being a military, economic, and cultural superpower less than they like electing a dementia-ridden child rapist, other countries have correctly realized that America's decline cannot be stopped, only slowed. After all, it's Americans themselves who are the root of the problem, and Trump is but a symptom. This instability is not going to stop when he leaves office. Better get your gold off the sinking ship, but do it slowly so as to not accelerate the sinking before you can get it all out.
Re: the gold situation after WWI, if you're interested I encourage you to read Liaquat Ahamed's excelled Lords of Finance, which won the Pulitzer, IIRC.
So if the USA declares "ownership be damned", it would be a net win for the USA.
Or in simpler terms: The USA has been giving out IOUs for real goods for decades. It is now tempting to default on those IOUs. The USA did this before. Up until 1971, a dollar certified a claim to gold. Then the USA simply canceled that promise.
The current ramp up to AI dominance might be what holds the USA back from breaking more ties with the world. It is a race that must be won. And investments from abroad help. But when the whole world is operated by US AI factories things might look different. When every task around the world is performed by intelligence generated in the USA, just like every computer is run by US software now - there might be little incentive left to "pay the rent" for the rest of the world that now sits around idle, fiddling their thumbs.
The dangerous situation we are in is that the US is berating and betraying its closest historical allies, eroding its credibility and soft power, and weakening its leverage at a time when threats to the Western order that has existed since the end of WW2 are growing rapidly.
Incidentally, the orange man in charge loves to tout "deals" in which foreign countries agree to invest substantial sums in the US, so any actions that lead foreign countries to believe their investments might be nationalized banana republic-style won't help the administration's efforts to attract investment and onshoring.
And the US owes trillions.
Would you keep your food or car in someone else's garage?
We are seeing that foreign countries no longer believe the USA is still a nation of laws.
Not saying it's right or sound that he's the elected leader of the country or that our politics is so warped... I mean, I blame it on being on the losing end of the most rigorously fought information war in history.
But I believe you can relax, because this is all nonsense.
FWIW, the American people can't even support a war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has been blowing up our soldiers for decades. Hard to imagine they'd show much support for invading an ally.
Sorry, but no.
Even if there are no kinetic attacks towards allies right now, the "crazy old man" is causing real harm. Harm to global stability and the world order, economies, to businesses and individuals, to long term initiatives such as research and healthcare. But most importantly, real harm to the trust between ourselves. Western allies can no longer trust the USA, it is broken, we no longer have the same values.
The first time in 2016 we forgave, everyone makes mistakes and Europe is certainly not free of them. But the American people chose to elect him twice with full knowledge, now everyone suffers.
So the rest of the world forges its own path now. America's military, economic and cultural hegemony will decline. Not tomorrow, maybe not even quickly, but inevitably. Godspeed !
But the real issue is that he has been elected twice, it is not some one-off freak accident, a lot of americans just care more about transphobia or pizzagate than climate change or geopolitics and thats why its now clear to the rest of the world that we can’t trust the US any more.
When the pigeon shouter threatens to annex Canada/Greenland you can shrug it off, when the leader of the largest economy and military says it, you can’t.
Words matter.
I’m British, We are often regarded as one of the US’s closest allies, I’m fucking furious with Trump and the people who support him, I’ve been boycotting everything US made that I can and I essentially see the current US as a globally destabilising force.
Are there decent Americans appalled by what they’ve become, sure, doesn’t make a difference to the outcome though either.
Norway's Oil Fund Proposes Selling Roughly $80B in U.S. Treasurys
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49564189
Dutch central bank moves share of gold from U.S., Canada to London
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49535526
but I want to offer the counterfactual with my comment that the "EU is foolish"
I'm pretty sure my take is right
Give me a break. In the present situation, the US is a lunatic asylum on fire, and the EU is a regular ol' boring place with boring problems.
Please explain your logic behind the idea that European countries needed to have adopted the gold standard that the US unilaterally changed the rules on, to be independent from the US.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock