Posted by vrganj 8 hours ago
Even sovereign funds (example Norway) are invested in American tech, funds, and indexes.
It is interesting to think about (from the perspective of an immigrant to Norway) how I moved my life’s savings from the US to Norway.
I’m now fully invested into Norway (real estate, savings, and retirement).
My understand is that Norwegians (and the nordics) have historically looked up to the US as a world leader.
I think that is no longer true and maybe this decision by Denmark is a data point of how the Nordics are changing?
It kind of feels like we all have been caught holding the bag (US reserve currency) and now we have to carefully unwind our position.
I’ve lost my point. Maybe my goal here is to just contribute to this discussion to distract from the exhaustion.
But this has definitely changed for me now. The idea of crossing the border and having to flip a coin is the border control guy a nice guy or not is not appealing as a diabetic who needs his phone to be with him untampered and who doesn't want to sit in a cell somewhere for days/weeks because they posted a funny meme of a person you can't joke about. Or who just witnesses this absolute inequality happening, and who witnesses the leaders of this country coming to my country and giving their support for parties who want me to not marry and who doesn't want to see me existing.
I am just tired. And sad. I wish I could get our relationship back with the US but I don't know... Even if we backtrack from here, get back to the "olden times", it will take a moment until I can enjoy US again.
P.S. Conan is still a treasure!
That is nothing new. It's how it's been forever. And not only arriving in the USA, but also Canada, Germany and other places.
I waited hours in Newark even before the current joke of a government. The risk of being in a jail without my phone which has a life-saving app to manage my diabetes is a risk I am not going to take.
Have you heard that happening more than once?
Having your luggage searched, long interrogations, dog sniffing, and then more interrogations - that has been common on international borders. All for no other reason than the border guard didn't like your face. That's my real life experience as a person who used to travel a lot. And many others I've met told similar stories, including being denied entry. So it's been a coin flip for a long time.
Last time I read that story they were given the option to immediately fly back to Germany for free after their tourist visa was declined but the girls declined the flight because they wanted to fly somewhere else on another flight which wasn’t available yet, which means they had to be detained. So they stayed overnight in an immigration detention facility which included a search.
They also flew to Hawaii without a hotel booked which is something the guards always look for (that was basically 101 common knowledge when I first crossed 15yrs ago). Just like how having a flight out prebooked is important.
Strategically modifying one’s pension fund choices to prevent having sub-prime companies bundled into a possible success is not a sign of anything. The Nordic nations will attempt to stay allied to the US because survival depends on it. They are much closer to the frontier and Western Europe’s ability and desire to protect them is substantially weaker.
In the event of a fall of NATO far western countries like Spain or Portugal will likely free-ride by virtue of their geography. The Finns get no such benefit.
As a Dane, I would say yes. Especially among boomers there was always a genuine appreciation of the US and its role as guardian of a rules-based international order and western civilization more generally.
I think that sentiment has gone, even as younger generations have increasingly incorporated English words, music, TV and more into their own, but you seldom hear the same genuine trust in the US as a force for good.
No, this is just standard pension fund governance.
What are your thoughts on the general consensus of Nordics views and opinions about the US?
It really does look bad: low float multiplier rule (that will overweight SpaceX) introduced very recently, fast inclusion mechanism, insiders being allowed to sell faster than usual etc.
It all looks like an orchestrated dump into passive investors/pension funds/other ETF holders.
Investing in IPOs is a terrible strategy historically. Here we have several mega IPOs incoming with rules being re-designed just for them to be included faster in your "passive" portfolio.
Musk is a prominent Trump/MAGA supporter, and Trump has threatened to annex Greenland by force. SpaceX is part of Trump's Golden Dome project, and one of the reasons that Trump wants Greenland is to site ICBM detection and interceptor systems.
Nothing is stopping the US from deploying those in Greenland right now.
The only reason Trump wants Greenland is he's not all there -- Greenland looks big on the map so he's fixated on it.
That would require the (politically unlikely) agreement of the Danish government. See article 2 of the relevant treaty [1]:
"...establishing and/or operating such defense areas as the two Governments, on the basis of NATO defense plans, may from time to time agree to be necessary..."
> The only reason Trump wants Greenland is he's not all there -- Greenland looks big on the map so he's fixated on it.
I agree that that is part of it, but there is more to it than that.
(I'm not Danish or Greenlandic, so this is just my reading of the situation.)
Elon is rigging the stock market and getting index funds to invest in companies that are over-valued and thus not stable.
https://www.kiplinger.com/investing/what-the-nasdaqs-new-fas...
Buuut if Anthropic does the same and lists on the Nasdaq then I might reconsider.
What’s holding you back? And what alternative investments are you considering?
I recently did homework to decide whether to double down on VOO (S&P 500 index) or to diversify via VXUS (ex-US index), and concluded VOO is better for my risk-adjusted ROI outlook and time horizon.
This just being an incomplete list or is there another reason you name the last two but not Google?
Yes their compute costs are astronomical, but that can be managed down over time by more efficiency or mild enshittification that doesn’t create too much churn.
It’s pretty depressing to be honest. I don’t know how I could work in any of these military industry companies.
I think you're right that e.g. Anthropic wouldn't be on the block list, because: It's an IT company, and I suspect that even Palantir might make the cut. It is fairly annoying, because my pension fund won't invest in Rheinmetall, SAAB or Kongberg, which I think they should, but they will probably invest in Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX, which I don't really like.
Also, when you buy into an index fund, you are not funding the companies that the index tracks. That’s a misunderstanding of how the markets and index funds work.
They're valued like software companies, but they have terrible margins compared to software. Investors haven't figured out how to value these companies.
You'd sing a different song quite quickly once the threat stops being abstract as you don't get to free-ride on the security a defense industry provides.
What difference with Microsoft, amazon and google? They all heavily support the military.
Edit: OK, no the same person.
Because no part of this statement is accurate. They’d like investors to believe it’s very rare but they have multiple strong competitors, most of whom have much better financials, and the entire sector is worried that the open models are going to effectively cap rates below what they need to pay off their massive investments. Lastly, they’re not universally must-have in software development which is one of the domains best suited for LLMs but most corporate work lacks similar correctness oracles and we’re already seeing major corporate customers reconsider the cost/benefit ratio.
None of that means they’re doomed but a lot of stars need to align for them to keep their valuation up. They don’t need to go out of business for investors to lose money buying in at the peak.