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🇮🇪🇺🇦 Later today in the European Parliament, Sinn Féin will oppose an EU loan for Ukraine at a critical moment. They claim it distracts from tackling our own cost-of-living problems at home & threatens Irish neutrality. Both claims are wrong. Read more: https://t.co/f5Mq9d38d9

Rumours are going around that UK, Germany, and France have threatened to liquidate official reserves in US Treasuries in a 'nuclear option' if Trump does a deal with Putin over Ukraine to end the war against European interests. If true, it reveals what intellectual pygmies the Starmer, Macron, and Merz are. They massively underestimate what is practical or legal once again. Let's be rational on their behalf. 1. Total holdings of US Treasuries as FX reserves by the Bank of England, Banque de France, and German Bundesbank total approximately $550 billion of the total $1350 billion Treasuries owned within the three states. They cannot order liquidation of commercial bank holdings, the principal form of global margin and repo collateral keeping Europe liquid in global capital markets. 2. The 3 central bank holdings are just 1.43% of the total $38.45 trillion of US debt, so 1/70th. 3. US could take the hit much better than retaliatory selling of gilts, bunds, and tresors! The potential for blowback in European rates and volatility is massive. 4. State leaders lack the authority to order central banks to liquidate FX reserve assets. It's not their bonds, but the assets of central banks granted independence over monetary and reserves policies by statute as a fundamental choice of modern economies. I can't see any central bank asset manager agreeing to accept a liquidation order or state intervention in asset management policies, absent explicit divestment sanctions being imposed on USA. 5. The $550 billion couldn't be sold off all at once as no US dealer would do the liquidation, worrying about angering the New York Fed and the very poor liquidity and capacity for onward trading in today's massively over-concentrated and illiquid UST market. (The Silicon Valley Bank failure to liquidate its Treasuries reserves triggered a massive crisis in March 2023.) Like the threatened EU expropriation of the official reserves of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation in anticipation of Trump ceding the assets back to Russia, always inevitable when war ends, European leaders show a fundamentally flawed understanding of the world and their influence in it.