No. of Recommendations: 6
Well, the risk of money market funds is admittedly low, but T-bills is lower, so why not?
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Mostly because we are not one of the optimistic Americans referenced in the article, and are keeping our options open while maximizing our portability and doing our research. Buying US debt under the leadership of someone who has a history of and seeming fondness for defaulting on his debt and not paying his bills, has risks of it's own. Worse yet, we are living in a country dependent on those who got us here in the first place, to get us out again. ..Fair enough.
My comment was purely about the two specific alternatives of a T-bill versus a money market fund: there seems to be a relative advantage to the T-bill and no disadvantage to the T-bill, no matter where you live, so that's the one (among those two specific choices) I'd always recommend.
Whether you want EITHER of them, or any US- or US-dollar based asset, is another question. Personally I ditched all of my T-bills and USD deposits and over 90% of my US stocks during a couple of days in mid March, but I don't live in the US, so the risk profile is different. I had more or less assumed that most "US persons" were pretty safe with T-bills and, closer to your point, hostages to the governmental environment and therefore might as well play along. But of course a large country contains a multitude of views on world events. Being wiped out is wiped out no matter where you live, nor how remote the risk.
Interesting column by Chris Murphy, US senator for Connecticut, in today's Financial Times. The gist of it: the tariffs have precisely nothing to do with re-industrialization or the trade deficit or raising tax revenue. Rather, they are entirely about bringing the corporate sector to heel by creating an environment where they must become supplicants to survive, as part of the broader blocking of any group capable of affecting or voicing dissent against him. (universities, students, court rulings, legal firms, civil servants, journalists and media outlets, election officials...). Kind of a strong stance, the sort of thing that might once have sounded like a conspiracy theory, but it's from a senator. If an economic undertaking does not further its purported purpose, it exists for another purpose.
Not sure whether this link is paywalled
https://www.ft.com/content/6d0c25e1-f8e5-43d6-88eb...Jim
