There is no alternative.

What? There's an almost limitless supply of other entities you can lend money to.

None that can absorb such enormous capital flows.

Nonsense. The USA is not bigger than the rest of the world.

US capital markets are the largest and most liquid in the world. It's not even close.

There are of course a zillion other borrowers worldwide but they're all much smaller and suffer from a variety of other structural problems. If you need to deploy a huge amount of capital with low risk and high liquidity then US treasuries are still the only realistic option.

I am not defending the US government but the reason why you hold treasuries is because if you want to buy something in two years, or ten years, etc. there is a good chance you will want to buy something with dollars. Oil, soy beans, New York real estate..

Until you can buy oil without dollars. This was an explicit agreement called the Petrodollar system, which was premised on the US navy securing international trade. If the US navy proves unable to do that (and exhausts its arms and demonstrates unpreparedness for future conflicts) then the whole premise falls apart.

You might also stop buying real estate if the government seems unstable and economy is poised to collapse. Good soybeans also depend on fuel prices and the continued flow of fertilizer...

Or until you don't need to buy oil at all. China has reduced its consumption by 1.5M barrels/day this year alone.

To nitpick, much of that is probably due to halting refining for export and drawing down reserves. But of course the point stands that they are rapidly electrifying and expanding renewable generation.

Also tons and tons of coal. Hopefully just a stopgap.

Yeah, until they run out of coal.

China has large coal reserves, enough for many decades.

"China, the world’s largest coal consumer, has domestic reserves of coal to last the next 50 years, according to annual reserves data from the Ministry of Natural Resources cited by Bloomberg.

At current rates of domestic production, China also has crude oil reserves that could last for at least 18 more years, according to the ministry"

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/China-Say...

https://www.mining.com/web/china-has-enough-coal-reserves-to...

Wow. Only enough reserves to be measured in decades? Once it's gone it's gone. Genuine Carboniferous coal, one day a thousand years from now, might be a rare museum item!

I have a habit of thinking about history in very long terms, and that just does not sit right with me. That kind of thinking (oh we have enough for decades, let it rip!) happens, and the decades pass, and time inevitably is less kind to the descendants of such decision makers.

growing up (in the 70s/80s), the first time I was shocked at the exponential destructiveness of human civilisation was when I learnt that we had polluted the oceans. the second was when I found out that ubiquitous natural resources like oil could be completely consumed. I feel like either one would have been unthinkable even as late as 1900.

(incidentally the latest such shock was sometime this decade when I learnt that an aquifer could not only be depleted, but that that depletion would compact the soil so that it would thereafter be unable to hold water, and thus never (at least on our timescales) be able to be replenished. I think I'm still not over that!)

There is an interesting passage in Moby Dick where they talk about whether whaling could make whales go extinct, but the concern is brushed away as human hubris. How could humans completely destroy something that God created?

It's really shame that in 21st century humanity is burning stuff to produce energy.

Also, this means that if we let MBAs destroy this civilization, there won’t be any future advanced civilizations as we will have consumed all the easily usable resources they will need to jumpstart their technology tree from zero again. Even if the knowledge survives it could be useless

In addition to this China imports about 10℅ of its coal consumption. Could it increase the imports?

In historical terms, it took about 60 milion years to form this coal layers. Humanity will burn them in few centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous

From the point of view of energy. The conversion of solar energy into coal is very inefficient, tree need energy to reproduce, only a part of plant is converted into coal, other organisms consuming plant matter, etc.

Oil will only become more and more volatile. The supply chain is both complex and fragile to geopolitical nonsense. China is betting on stability and reliability, environmental concerns is just a bonus.

China is drawing down reserves it's been building over the last three years, not using less petro from a decrease in demand.

Until you find a more thrustworthy stewart of the international order. Everyone yells loudly about how bad the us is, but then you realize that the whole world voted with there feet that every other alternative is worse. The russians tried for years to write some replacement fiction into reality (BRICS) even though they would be the first to get shanked if the old great game returned. Its a absurd situation where empire cosplayers long for the times of "greatness" while struggling on even small "to real" acts ..

China is "trustworthy" in the sense that they have obvious, rational, consistent motivations and very stable government.

China's government is "very stable" until it's not. As a society, China has a long history but the central government has essentially collapsed or experienced violent revolution in 1976, 1969, 1949, 1927, 1911, 1850, 1796, 1644, etc. Perhaps we have reached "the end of history" and the Chinese Communist Party will now maintain stable control forever. Or maybe it will all fall apart again in a few decades due to resource shortages or factional power struggles or a foreign war.

The loss of a succession strategy with an elderly leader at the helm seems like a major issue.

... for everyone, Chinese or not, except the elderly leader in question.

Same for Russia.

That seems to be a recurring theme regardless of the country's economic system. We're two months away from seeing if the US still has a working succession strategy.

Are we talking about Russia or the US in that last sentence, or is the ambiguity the point?

> Everyone yells loudly about how bad the us is, but then you realize that the whole world voted with there feet that every other alternative is worse.

The main problem right now is that the US are not the US for which we voted with our feet. They are a worse alternative to the US that created the status quo (to their advantage obviously, but much of the world also benefitted from free trade and the lack of other world wars).

"$20 Billion Oil Deals Paid in Chinese Yuan, US Dollar Left Out"

https://watcher.guru/news/20-billion-oil-deals-paid-in-chine...

"China and Saudi Arabia Settle First Oil Trade Using Digital Yuan"

https://www.economywatch.com/china-and-saudi-arabia-settle-f...

This isn’t true. You can buy oil with other currencies. It’s just that dollars are liquid. No pun intended.

In a way, the bond market tracks international central banks' confidence that this will continue to be true. If they lose some of that confidence, their stock of bonds moves from USD to RMB/EUR/JPY/AUD/CAD/SGD/etc.

True, except you're being way too easy on those other currencies. Currencies need to be issued by groups able to guarantee international trade, otherwise there's no point.

RMB - maybe, but nobody sane trusts China to not immediately change priorities on a dime

EUR - imho (much) less chance than RMB, but they're using a hack: of EUR is a massive entity and internally there's no choice. Literally not allowed (due to tax reasons) (exceptions of course made for favored entities) (I feel that those favored entities exist, and how big they are, should be a huge red flag for anyone considering using EUR)

JPY - can't project force ... and doesn't even try

AUD - no

CAD - no

SGD - no

I don't understand why you're not listing GBP, as they have at least at some point done this. Of course they were a worse steward of international trade than the worst point of the US. Also, you consider AUD, but not CHF?

So what choice is there, really? This is really a way to try to push the US to do more, for less "exorbitant privilege" (especially EUR). Of course, a great many people are very interested in doing just that. It strikes me as an extremely dangerous game to play. Yes, the odds of winning are good, but if you lose, you lose everything.

I was going by foreign currency reserves, which feature CAD and AUD in much greater quantities than CHF. Also I swapped in SGD for GBP, whoops.

Global reserves continue to hold USD in greater quantities than anything else. A movement away from the USD still means a relative loss of faith in the US. If there's nobody who can guarantee trade then you still need to hold reserves, right? You just have to hold a broad and shallow pool rather than going deep on one currency.

Pretty confident it’s going to be EUR, note how they dealt with Trump tariff’s shenanigans. Took it slowly, and decidedly, sure let the countries say words and what not, but at the end of the day it’s decided by the EU. Just one persons opinion.

And you're not terrified that's the situation? The beef the US has with the EUR is simple: the US is what's defending Europe militarily (nuclear and non-nuclear. The Pentagon is the reason Ukraine hasn't been nuked yet, or more likely, that Kiyv didn't surrender because they didn't have nukes). That was never given freely. It was politically impossible to get governments to actually pay for that, so it was decided to trade in USD (this was before petrodollar), giving the US "exorbitant privilege" (which roughly translates to that the US gets to tax most of global trade at something like 2 to 4% and use that for themselves). That the US got that was not an accident, but a policy decision. The Euro takes that away, but of course, no European country is willing to either now start paying, or to defend itself. To say nothing of France, the Netherlands or Denmark defending remote EU territories like Greenland, ABC islands or Polynesia (which would require, for starters, militarily controlling supply lines to those territories).

Given the history of economic sanctions (what the EU is doing) ... of course people don't know that history, but the TLDR is that nearly always economic sanctions are a prelude to war. They don't just not work. In many cases they cause wars. WW1 was caused by economic sanctions (and the scale of EU economic sanctions is 100x bigger than what caused WW1), and often the economic sanctions on Germany after WW1 are generally thought to be the big reason for WW2. It makes sense from a game theory perspective: if a government, whose power is fundamentally based on force, lets economic sanctions convince them, they will be attacked by their own people. So they simply cannot give in, and historically that's what you indeed mostly see: when a country is targeted by economic sanctions, it's government usually decides to attack.

The EUR is imposing very large scale sanctions on ... essentially everyone. Russia and China most obviously of course, but sanctions are so widely used by the EU you can literally say it's being used against everyone from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, or geographically from Paraguay to North Korea. And why is the EU doing this? Exactly the reason Trump is doing it: sanctions are "power without needing parliament to approve the budget for anything".

The fear is: the historically most likely outcome of what the EU is doing, what EUR is being used for, is another very large scale war.

its mostly because the global economy is dollarized so there's a number of benefits store your wealth in dollars as a hedge or point of stability. If the dollar's dominance wanes, so too will be the appetite for US treasuries.

The real answer to your question is the US bond market is an auction, and rates are going up and up, with some sketchy tactics being employed to try and keep them down.

What’s happening to US bonds has been compared to using a credit card to pay off your mortgage...

> Go further with your reasoning... Why would anyone lend the US more...

Because if you don't, you are abducted or killed or "regime changed" or sanctioned to famine-level poverty - all for "freedom & democracy". Kindly remember that the Corporate States of America has the world's most powerful military... well I suppose it is nowadays in the top #3.

It's hard to twist the definition of the term in such a way that the US doesn't have the most powerful military.