America was in practice running an empire that collected tribute from the rest of planet earth in exchange for entries in a database denominated in a currency they controlled and that was accepted everywhere. Really the only way it could go wrong is putting it under the control of someone who doesn't understand the kayfabe...
The fact that he has done countless things that are harmful to the US and not a single thing that is in the country's best interests tells me all I need to know. Either he's aligned with an enemy or he just hates the country and wants to destroy it.
Yeah I think the most obvious explanation is looting and ego (to explain the ballroom and putting his name everywhere). I also think there's an awful lot of foreign influence around him and his family and friends before and during his term(s). I mean if I'm a foreign actor seeing your leader's keen interest in looting, I'll probably make him an offer or two...
That money is held in a US treasury account. In February the estimated price from the first 50 M barrels was $2.8bn... with the USA+Israel bombing of Iran, the price of course would have increased since.
> It is not clear what portion of the revenues from the sale - which analysts expect to raise about $2.8bn (£2.1bn) - would be shared with Venezuela.
But let's assume that the USA is going to retain "only" 5% of it: that's still 140 million $ of money flowing in, in perpetuity.
Not to mention that having control of the whole 2.8 billion $ also buys further room for loan and deals made on the USA's preferred currency and preferred terms... Or the expropriation of CITGO.
Of course, that money flowing in will be mostly in the pocket of Trump itself, of the billionaires surrounding him, of the military industrial complex (you have to replenish the weapons stockpiles, after all) and all of the federal contractors (that includes most of the FAANG!)... Lots of people in the USA "labor aristocracy" are going to see material benefit from it.
Ultimately, there's still going to be lots of poor people in the USA who won't be able to afford insulin, and there's going to be lots of resentment abroad (not only in Venezuela)... And one could split hair that Maduro's kidnapping is in the USA's interest, but not in its "best interest" (or similarly trying to argue a no-true-scotman for the definition of "USA's interest")
Not to mention, but it's not only Trump's: it's everyone who he surrounds himself with: JD Vance, Pam Bondi (until a few days ago?), Pete Hegseth, the military generals that didn't get kicked out by Hegseth, etc.
They're all complicit, and they're all going along with him.
And of course, if the Democrats will return to power in the next few elections, I don't expect them to relinquish the leverage and resources that Trump got them, just like Obama and Biden didn't pull out of Afghanistan for several years.
Of course, we saw with AIPAC and JStreet that US lobbying is seeing tons of money from abroad: but those are two different faces of the same medal: the oligarchs and the bourgeoisie have common interests across different countries, and the USA is definitely influencing politicians abroad as much, if not more, than moneyed interests abroad are influencing politicians in the USA.
> That money is held in a US treasury account. In February the estimated price from the first 50 M barrels was $2.8bn... with the USA+Israel bombing of Iran, the price of course would have increased since.
That’s chicken feed compared to the amounts that have been wiped off the stock markets.
I mean on their own those are nice numbers, but you also have to add in the extra military costs of blowing crap up and it starts to seem like chump change to me. We just had a 1.5 trillion defense spending proposal.
Trump, if the US makes it through this administration, might be a boon longterm if it wakes up the populace. The blatantly obvious corruption and grift might just do the trick. Those are some pretty big ifs though.
I disagree with probably the majority of Trump's main policy ideas, but I think a strong case can be made that his immigration policies are in the country's best interests. Not all of them, but as a whole.
Currently, probably yes. If American immigration policy was reshaped to favor immigration of people from high-performing societies, then it would be the opposite.
What color are the people in these 'high performing societies'? I think I have a guess.
Did 'high performing societies' build the railroads? Mine the steel? Forge it? Did 'high performing societies' build the culture we enjoy today?
Here's a secret that you should know but evidently life has never taught you: people who have to struggle to survive are generally smarter, more vigorous, more honorable people. They understand the toll in sweat and blood that the wrong decision takes. They are exactly who we need.
We don't need a nation of pampered trust fund man-children, turning up their delicate noses at everyone not a member of a 'high performing society'.
Illegal immigration brings masses of people from more corrupt, disordered, and perhaps lower average intelligence societies into the US in conditions that make it hard for even the ones who are capable of assimilation to assimilate. It also constitutes a massive flouting of the law for the benefit of business, which sets a bad precedent and lowers public trust in institutions. It also contributes to rising racial tensions that encourage the growth of ethnic tribalism and weaken trust in liberalism.
If you really want to get rid of illegal immigrants, you don't need ICE doing sweeps.
Just make them unemployable. Setup an effective employment eligibility system, and require that employers verify the workers in the system before any payment over $100. Collect biometrics from workers and verify against IRS records. Employers that flout this get fines of 10x wages paid, up to N% of revenue, and maybe jailtime for owners and managers that knowingly violate.
What we have in the U.S. is a bunch of people and politicians loudly decrying illegal immigration and illegal employment, but enjoying the fruits of that illegal employment while paying a fraction of what legal workers would have to be paid.
There's huge appetite for a police state against the little guy, and no appetite for that same police state against business owners and managers.
There's a better way than that. The way the US tax system actually works is incredibly misleading:
1) We pretend to have an income tax but then make it work like a consumption tax in practice. Ordinary people put earnings in excess of spending in a 401k and defer the tax until they want to spend the money. Rich people defer capital gains indefinitely until they want to spend the money. It's an income tax on paper but a consumption tax in practice, and doing it that way is much more complicated than just using a consumption tax.
2) We pretend to have a progressive income tax, but then impose benefits phase outs that fully cancel out the difference in marginal rates between the poor and the rich. Convert the benefits to cash and eliminate the phase outs and you get something which is equally if not more progressive, significantly more efficient and dramatically less complicated.
So, you can throw all of that out and replace it with a flat rate consumption tax and a UBI and it would be as close to a Pareto optimal improvement as anything in politics ever is.
Which also makes a huge amount of headway against the illegal immigration problem, because another disadvantage of pretending to have an income tax is that it effectively subsidizes anyone paying people under the table since then they're not paying the tax. Whereas if people working under the table still have to pay the consumption tax on everything they buy, and they also don't receive the UBI because they're not lawful residents, they'd be at a disadvantage relative to ordinary citizens, instead of the existing system where breaking the rules makes you better off.
The tax code is inefficient on purpose. A simple uniform system is politically infeasible, due to the fact our political system relies on pretending to give special favors to every tailored interest group individually (making the tax code even bigger every time).
We arent at a loss of what to change to make it simpler/optimal. We're at a loss at how to make anyone proposing that not lose the election when everyone else is telling each group they'll lose their special carveous and how about I sweeten the deal some more.
That part of it doesn't seem like the problem. If you want to make a carve out for some group and you're using a consumption tax then you just don't tax that thing or lower the rate (with the cost of having to increase the general rate on everything else). This is occasionally even a good thing, e.g. have a higher tax rate on petroleum than other things to price the externality, or a lower rate on groceries because they're a necessity.
And many of the carve outs are stupid and we shouldn't do them, but that's a separate layer of complexity/inefficiency on top of the mess we get from trying to pretend that "progressive marginal rate structure" and "means testing government benefits" are useful things to have at the same time when they're the mathematical inverse of one another, or that we want an "income tax" even though we don't want the major disincentive for anyone to have savings or make productive investments rather than immediately spending all income on hedonistic consumption.
I agree that your idea would be better. That said, it is still quite possible that even Trump's immigration approach is overall more good than bad for the country.
It's really not. They're deporting less people than Biden did during the same time[1]. They're spending record amounts of money per person deported as well.
I don't disagree that we should be deporting people faster, but this is not the way to accomplish that goal at all. Nor should we be building huge detention facilities. We should be making the process go smoother and faster, not holding people.
Even if Trump's approach is worse than Biden's, which I'm not sure of, that still does not mean it is bad for the country.
Counting deportations alone does not count people who decide not to come at all.
Also, note that I did not say that we should necessarily be deporting more people. I am actually pretty neutral on illegal immigration. But I am trying to address the question of what is good for the country, which is a different thing from what my personal preferences are.
Trump's immigration approach is not an approach - it's just an excuse for him to create his own Gestapo.
What was the point of sending ICE, a "domestic" agency, to the Winter Olympics, or letting them take over duties from the TSA? What does an "Immigration and Customs Enforcement" agency have anything to do at a foreign country? What's the point of the Secret Service then?
Intelligence at least as measured by IQ tests is not distributed evenly across humanity. Intelligence as measured by scientific achievements is also not distributed evenly across humanity. Now, this does not mean that intelligence is necessarily not distributed evenly across humanity. For example, I imagine that Germans in 1 AD probably had about the same innate biological intelligence level as Germans in 1800. Yet Germans in 1 AD had few intellectual achievements, whereas in 1800 were some of the most intellectually achieving people in the world. So clearly there is more going on than just biologically innate intelligence. Yet certainly there is some good reason to believe that some human groups have more innate biological intelligence potential than others. I don't think it's racism to claim this. It would be racism to advocate, for example, for treating a high-performing person like a low-performing person because he comes from a low-performing ethnic group. Which I'm not. Like I said in another comment, my attitude to illegal immigration is neutral. But from the point of view of what is best for the United States as a country, which is different from what I personally want, I think it's probably best to encourage immigration of average-high-intelligence groups rather than average-low-intelligence ones.
Illegal immigration brings masses of people from more corrupt, disordered […]
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." — Donald Trump, June 16, 2015
What blows my mind is how liberals and progressives (of which I count myself a member) don't see to care that this is the policy that pushed Trump into office. Without it he would have flopped with just his MAGA core.
All you need to do to fix illegal immigration is to go after the employers. You know, actually enforce the laws. Streamline it. Declare it a national emergency and put more onerous requirements on businesses to verify legal status. Send ICE to businesses to investigate them instead of kidnapping people.
You'll probably find out pretty quickly that agriculture is extremely dependent on illegal labour, but so be it. Bring it into the light and have an actual debate. The current approach is all for show, or at worst, intimidation.
While we're at it, when did central banks start to buy lots of gold and under which POTUS? Could it have something to do with the freezing of hundreds of billions of some sovereign assets?
There is something awfully bad happening to the internet, including Hacker News.
It seems like rage-baiting, polarizing titles and vibe based comments are being upvoted, with no interest in the facts. For example, in this case:
1. The growth of the gold reserve in comparison to US Treasuries have very little to do with growth in gold acquisition, and has everything to do with gold more than doubling in price in a year.
2. To make it even worse, gold has since fluctuated in value, and treasuries overtook gold momentarily just a week ago. These price fluctuations has nothing to do with geopolitics.
3. Central bank buying of gold has been trending down in the last year, down 21% from 2024. So far in 2026 it's been going even lower.
4. Gold owned by central banks was higher than US treasuries in the 90s (this is mentioned in the article at least).
This is a little meta - but the thing that bothers me is that this low quality discussion like in this thread is spreading everywhere with the same mechanism - bring politics and polarization into every place, no matter how tangentially related it is.
Side stepping a little, but the Twitter and Reddit exoduses brought in a lot of people with established culture and communication dynamics at discrete periods. I considered writing an extension that collapses comments of accounts based on keywords and creation date, but ultimately decided that was regressive.
I think it's important to recognize how much the world has changed in a short period of time. HN was created when SV was unique, a large fraction of the globe was not on the internet, and web tech was new and novel. Everyone was still figuring out how to handle outreach and networking (I was positive it was a scam when the Omiyadar Network cold contacted me - "who does that?"). Today, I meet kids who made their first commits at the same age I was just trying to find friends in town who had computers. Now, our advanced is their common, and they're growing up primed for engagement-forward networking and self-promotion.
HN isn't a calcified relic of the era when it was created, it's a product of its people. We're seeing the new generations connecting from all over the world at a time when the foundational HNers are fading away, and sometimes when there's friction with my expectations of civility and etiquette in discourse and it feels like the noise is drowning out the signal and I yearn for the smaller, quieter days, I take that as my queue that I need to step back and appreciate that this is their time, too.
I think there are less experts on HN than years ago or a decade ago. And the culture of HN is getting slightly changing to a more Reddit culture every year.
It’s too bad because it’s the only place I know where you have experts in tech but also in other industries. And where I got very interesting discussions.
Thanks appreciate the broader context in this post. As to your meta comment, besides bots, I think a lot of people are facing a great deal of pain and fear. They're emotional and even in hn a critical mass has switched to reading and writing with their gut. Good vibe project, analyse the level of emotionality in comments over time, I'd bet it's gone vertical in the past few months.
I agree with your "sensationalism is bad" take; especially as meaningful, non-incendiary comments now often get quickly downvoted for viewpoint, not tone (IMO downvoting should cost 0.1-0.3 karma). But not with "nothing to see in CB gold holdings fluctuations" view:
R1. But central bank gold holdings are rising organically, and partially at the expense of US treasuries. CB gold holdings have been dropping for 35 years, until about 2015. The price rise of gold from 2005 to 2015 did not reverse this trend. From 2015 to 2019 gold price did not rise, but reported holdings did. The recent doubling of the gold price muddies things a little, but the trend is clear.
R3. Reported gold purchases have trended down in 2025 and 2026, probably due to price doubling. But they are still positive. Emerging markets did not sell into this strength to build up more liquid holdings (UST) as more effective tools to support their economies against future malaise. Even "trending down" part is muddy, too, because some countries CB do not report it. China, an elephant in the room, started better obfuscating its holdings, including gold, since COVID.
R4. Yes. Gold owned by CB strognly trended down since 1980. That trend stopped in 2005 and reversed somewhere between 2005 and 2015. And likely accelerated in the last few years.
As a side note, I personally see USTs losing dominance as a reserve asset as a good thing. USG needs some checks on its spending, and world being willing to buy long dated treasuries at below inflation rates incentivizes the "we do not need to solve real problems, we can just print more money" mindset. My 2c.
Well, having tracked soft-science experts for 30 years, I have to say they're wrong over 50% of the time. Moreso, if it's coming from media that's owned by the same country that is causing evil.
One less conspiratorial but more pernicious angle, is that attacking things that are good but complex is a great strategy for troll politicians who don't care about the success of their country but just like the attention.
See Brexit, and free trade in general.
It's a good way to get "the establishment" to gang up on you and defend something complicated while you present simple but wrong alternatives and promise the world.
I also think he's up for sale (as are all the other similar politicians) to a multitude of buyers, foreign and domestic.
Not aware of what happened in the 70s then with Bretton Woods? Not aware of what happened pre-08? It has gone wrong multiple times before just for the US and the US exporting inflation is not good for either the US or the rest of the world.
As with NATO, I am not sure what the argument is...yes, other countries should take more of a role in their own defence...yes, other countries should take more of a role in their own economic governance/financial stability.
On this topic specifically though, I will also point out that whatever the faults of the US, no-one had a problem when Germany was exporting crippling levels of deflation (this is one of the main issues that wasn't solved after WW2 despite being identified by Keynes: deficit countries will be told they need to rebalance, but not surplus countries). Germany have solved that problem with catastrophically bad foreign policy destroying their economy (once again) but before this, they were the main source of global financial instability (China, to their credit, is probably one of the only countries ever to rebalance from surplus to deficit country...Germany has done this multiple times over the years and has blamed other countries every time).
Other countries using gold instead of US debt is good for both the US and those countries. Most of the "increase" has been due to gold rising in value and, fundamentally, it cannot solve the problem because the price cannot rise as much as it needs to but it should be part of a mix with SDRs and other securities.
US will have to refinance $ 10T of debt next year. That's a gargantuan amount of money and I see no scenario in which this won't have quite higher yields than the expiring one, remnant of the low rate decade.
With foreigners and hedge funds less prone to buy US debt right now it's going to be quite interesting to see what will happen.
The events of the last year certainly have a role to play, but the overall effect is just the result of trendlines that have been in play for quite a while.
For the first time in history we are seeing multiple signals of USD losing its #1 position to EUR, all within the last year :
1. Euro-denominated interest rate derivatives (IRD) overtook US dollar-denominated contracts in the over-the-counter (OTC) market for the first time in history and the scale of the crossover is staggering.
2. EUR Real Effective Exchange Rate (REER) which measures actual purchasing power (not nominal price) is going in the opposite direction of USD real purchasing power (RTWEXBGS). 2025/2026 is the largest divergence in history: 10 percentage points in a year.
3. US treasuries is no longer a number 1 foreign reserve asset. EUR reserves grew 2.5x faster than USD reserves when measured in its own absolute terms.
Unlike the Eurozone which maintains a fiscally responsible budget with reasonable debt and a trade surplus, there is simply no foreseeable fix to the problem of ballooning US debt and trade deficits. Nothing can fix the US budget mess.
Anyone who is paying attention to the numbers would certainly have more confidence in EUR over USD.
Since a lot of time the US economy and finance are under stress. Not panic but stress. And this makes the leaders stressful too, so they take defensive and hostile actions, most lately by the Trump's government. The world will neither wait nor allow the US to remain leader, especially with non standard ways. The world changes to a tri-pole with satellite nodes. Gold price is just a variable in the system and is dependent of the global state.
I am actually convinced that the last year started the descent of the U.S. as the world’s super power. No wonder U.S. treasuries lost trust. It’s only going to get worse. It doesn’t matter what some billionaires do/get from their ability to manipulate some powers be. The rest of the investment community understands that free markets are strengthened by rule of law and adherence to the law and deploying a self styled socialistic distribution of economic capital is not signaling strength but weakness to the world.
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> someone too stupid to understand
That's only true if he's actually "your guy". There's an alternative where it's not stupidity that I think more people should be mulling over.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by greed.
>Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by greed.
Not considering greed a blatant demonstration of malice has to be the single dumbest thing our society has normalized.
The most recent example include the profits from Venezuelan oil:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgn7p7g79wo
https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/trump-administration-manda...
That money is held in a US treasury account. In February the estimated price from the first 50 M barrels was $2.8bn... with the USA+Israel bombing of Iran, the price of course would have increased since.
> It is not clear what portion of the revenues from the sale - which analysts expect to raise about $2.8bn (£2.1bn) - would be shared with Venezuela.
But let's assume that the USA is going to retain "only" 5% of it: that's still 140 million $ of money flowing in, in perpetuity.
Not to mention that having control of the whole 2.8 billion $ also buys further room for loan and deals made on the USA's preferred currency and preferred terms... Or the expropriation of CITGO.
Of course, that money flowing in will be mostly in the pocket of Trump itself, of the billionaires surrounding him, of the military industrial complex (you have to replenish the weapons stockpiles, after all) and all of the federal contractors (that includes most of the FAANG!)... Lots of people in the USA "labor aristocracy" are going to see material benefit from it.
Ultimately, there's still going to be lots of poor people in the USA who won't be able to afford insulin, and there's going to be lots of resentment abroad (not only in Venezuela)... And one could split hair that Maduro's kidnapping is in the USA's interest, but not in its "best interest" (or similarly trying to argue a no-true-scotman for the definition of "USA's interest")
Not to mention, but it's not only Trump's: it's everyone who he surrounds himself with: JD Vance, Pam Bondi (until a few days ago?), Pete Hegseth, the military generals that didn't get kicked out by Hegseth, etc.
They're all complicit, and they're all going along with him.
And of course, if the Democrats will return to power in the next few elections, I don't expect them to relinquish the leverage and resources that Trump got them, just like Obama and Biden didn't pull out of Afghanistan for several years.
Of course, we saw with AIPAC and JStreet that US lobbying is seeing tons of money from abroad: but those are two different faces of the same medal: the oligarchs and the bourgeoisie have common interests across different countries, and the USA is definitely influencing politicians abroad as much, if not more, than moneyed interests abroad are influencing politicians in the USA.
The problem is not only Trump
> That money is held in a US treasury account. In February the estimated price from the first 50 M barrels was $2.8bn... with the USA+Israel bombing of Iran, the price of course would have increased since.
That’s chicken feed compared to the amounts that have been wiped off the stock markets.
> that's still 140 million $ of money flowing in, in perpetuity.
Oh hey, that's roughly enough to cover for Trump's new renovation plans!
> The problem is not only Trump
Trump, if the US makes it through this administration, might be a boon longterm if it wakes up the populace. The blatantly obvious corruption and grift might just do the trick. Those are some pretty big ifs though.
Do you think, on average, a native born American is more useful to America than one who moves here?
Did 'high performing societies' build the railroads? Mine the steel? Forge it? Did 'high performing societies' build the culture we enjoy today?
Here's a secret that you should know but evidently life has never taught you: people who have to struggle to survive are generally smarter, more vigorous, more honorable people. They understand the toll in sweat and blood that the wrong decision takes. They are exactly who we need.
We don't need a nation of pampered trust fund man-children, turning up their delicate noses at everyone not a member of a 'high performing society'.
Even if you disagree, Trump's policies have not been effective at anything, apart from creating headlines.
These same headlines have secondary negative effects for the US, like hurting international tourism.
Just make them unemployable. Setup an effective employment eligibility system, and require that employers verify the workers in the system before any payment over $100. Collect biometrics from workers and verify against IRS records. Employers that flout this get fines of 10x wages paid, up to N% of revenue, and maybe jailtime for owners and managers that knowingly violate.
What we have in the U.S. is a bunch of people and politicians loudly decrying illegal immigration and illegal employment, but enjoying the fruits of that illegal employment while paying a fraction of what legal workers would have to be paid.
There's huge appetite for a police state against the little guy, and no appetite for that same police state against business owners and managers.
1) We pretend to have an income tax but then make it work like a consumption tax in practice. Ordinary people put earnings in excess of spending in a 401k and defer the tax until they want to spend the money. Rich people defer capital gains indefinitely until they want to spend the money. It's an income tax on paper but a consumption tax in practice, and doing it that way is much more complicated than just using a consumption tax.
2) We pretend to have a progressive income tax, but then impose benefits phase outs that fully cancel out the difference in marginal rates between the poor and the rich. Convert the benefits to cash and eliminate the phase outs and you get something which is equally if not more progressive, significantly more efficient and dramatically less complicated.
So, you can throw all of that out and replace it with a flat rate consumption tax and a UBI and it would be as close to a Pareto optimal improvement as anything in politics ever is.
Which also makes a huge amount of headway against the illegal immigration problem, because another disadvantage of pretending to have an income tax is that it effectively subsidizes anyone paying people under the table since then they're not paying the tax. Whereas if people working under the table still have to pay the consumption tax on everything they buy, and they also don't receive the UBI because they're not lawful residents, they'd be at a disadvantage relative to ordinary citizens, instead of the existing system where breaking the rules makes you better off.
We arent at a loss of what to change to make it simpler/optimal. We're at a loss at how to make anyone proposing that not lose the election when everyone else is telling each group they'll lose their special carveous and how about I sweeten the deal some more.
And many of the carve outs are stupid and we shouldn't do them, but that's a separate layer of complexity/inefficiency on top of the mess we get from trying to pretend that "progressive marginal rate structure" and "means testing government benefits" are useful things to have at the same time when they're the mathematical inverse of one another, or that we want an "income tax" even though we don't want the major disincentive for anyone to have savings or make productive investments rather than immediately spending all income on hedonistic consumption.
I don't disagree that we should be deporting people faster, but this is not the way to accomplish that goal at all. Nor should we be building huge detention facilities. We should be making the process go smoother and faster, not holding people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_in_the_second_Trum...
Counting deportations alone does not count people who decide not to come at all.
Also, note that I did not say that we should necessarily be deporting more people. I am actually pretty neutral on illegal immigration. But I am trying to address the question of what is good for the country, which is a different thing from what my personal preferences are.
What was the point of sending ICE, a "domestic" agency, to the Winter Olympics, or letting them take over duties from the TSA? What does an "Immigration and Customs Enforcement" agency have anything to do at a foreign country? What's the point of the Secret Service then?
> perhaps lower average intelligence societies
This is nothing but racism. Intelligence is distributed evenly across humanity.
On an unrelated note, how high do you think the rate of American citizens with literacy level 1 is?
>
Illegal immigration brings masses of people from more corrupt, disordered […]"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." — Donald Trump, June 16, 2015
* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-f...
Never mind that illegal/undocumented immigrants have lower crime and incarceration rates than native-born Americans:
* https://www.cato.org/blog/why-do-illegal-immigrants-have-low...
* https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117
All you need to do to fix illegal immigration is to go after the employers. You know, actually enforce the laws. Streamline it. Declare it a national emergency and put more onerous requirements on businesses to verify legal status. Send ICE to businesses to investigate them instead of kidnapping people.
You'll probably find out pretty quickly that agriculture is extremely dependent on illegal labour, but so be it. Bring it into the light and have an actual debate. The current approach is all for show, or at worst, intimidation.
But it does seem to be what their base wants. Keeps the higher moral ground without the irritating responsibility to govern.
It seems like rage-baiting, polarizing titles and vibe based comments are being upvoted, with no interest in the facts. For example, in this case:
1. The growth of the gold reserve in comparison to US Treasuries have very little to do with growth in gold acquisition, and has everything to do with gold more than doubling in price in a year.
2. To make it even worse, gold has since fluctuated in value, and treasuries overtook gold momentarily just a week ago. These price fluctuations has nothing to do with geopolitics.
3. Central bank buying of gold has been trending down in the last year, down 21% from 2024. So far in 2026 it's been going even lower.
4. Gold owned by central banks was higher than US treasuries in the 90s (this is mentioned in the article at least).
This is a little meta - but the thing that bothers me is that this low quality discussion like in this thread is spreading everywhere with the same mechanism - bring politics and polarization into every place, no matter how tangentially related it is.
I think it's important to recognize how much the world has changed in a short period of time. HN was created when SV was unique, a large fraction of the globe was not on the internet, and web tech was new and novel. Everyone was still figuring out how to handle outreach and networking (I was positive it was a scam when the Omiyadar Network cold contacted me - "who does that?"). Today, I meet kids who made their first commits at the same age I was just trying to find friends in town who had computers. Now, our advanced is their common, and they're growing up primed for engagement-forward networking and self-promotion.
HN isn't a calcified relic of the era when it was created, it's a product of its people. We're seeing the new generations connecting from all over the world at a time when the foundational HNers are fading away, and sometimes when there's friction with my expectations of civility and etiquette in discourse and it feels like the noise is drowning out the signal and I yearn for the smaller, quieter days, I take that as my queue that I need to step back and appreciate that this is their time, too.
It’s too bad because it’s the only place I know where you have experts in tech but also in other industries. And where I got very interesting discussions.
R1. But central bank gold holdings are rising organically, and partially at the expense of US treasuries. CB gold holdings have been dropping for 35 years, until about 2015. The price rise of gold from 2005 to 2015 did not reverse this trend. From 2015 to 2019 gold price did not rise, but reported holdings did. The recent doubling of the gold price muddies things a little, but the trend is clear.
R3. Reported gold purchases have trended down in 2025 and 2026, probably due to price doubling. But they are still positive. Emerging markets did not sell into this strength to build up more liquid holdings (UST) as more effective tools to support their economies against future malaise. Even "trending down" part is muddy, too, because some countries CB do not report it. China, an elephant in the room, started better obfuscating its holdings, including gold, since COVID.
R4. Yes. Gold owned by CB strognly trended down since 1980. That trend stopped in 2005 and reversed somewhere between 2005 and 2015. And likely accelerated in the last few years.
As a side note, I personally see USTs losing dominance as a reserve asset as a good thing. USG needs some checks on its spending, and world being willing to buy long dated treasuries at below inflation rates incentivizes the "we do not need to solve real problems, we can just print more money" mindset. My 2c.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/russias-central-ban...
See Brexit, and free trade in general.
It's a good way to get "the establishment" to gang up on you and defend something complicated while you present simple but wrong alternatives and promise the world.
I also think he's up for sale (as are all the other similar politicians) to a multitude of buyers, foreign and domestic.
As with NATO, I am not sure what the argument is...yes, other countries should take more of a role in their own defence...yes, other countries should take more of a role in their own economic governance/financial stability.
On this topic specifically though, I will also point out that whatever the faults of the US, no-one had a problem when Germany was exporting crippling levels of deflation (this is one of the main issues that wasn't solved after WW2 despite being identified by Keynes: deficit countries will be told they need to rebalance, but not surplus countries). Germany have solved that problem with catastrophically bad foreign policy destroying their economy (once again) but before this, they were the main source of global financial instability (China, to their credit, is probably one of the only countries ever to rebalance from surplus to deficit country...Germany has done this multiple times over the years and has blamed other countries every time).
Other countries using gold instead of US debt is good for both the US and those countries. Most of the "increase" has been due to gold rising in value and, fundamentally, it cannot solve the problem because the price cannot rise as much as it needs to but it should be part of a mix with SDRs and other securities.
With foreigners and hedge funds less prone to buy US debt right now it's going to be quite interesting to see what will happen.
Here's a world gold council (i know...) review/survey of central banks gold holdings from mid 2025 (https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/central-bank-gold-rese...). It notes that gold purchases (by mass) have been elevated going back to ~2023.
Gold prices have also been on an upward trajectory ever since 2023 (https://goldprice.org/gold-price-history.html)
Whatever is happening now is bigger than actions over the last year.
It's like witnessing a self-decapitation.
1. Euro-denominated interest rate derivatives (IRD) overtook US dollar-denominated contracts in the over-the-counter (OTC) market for the first time in history and the scale of the crossover is staggering.
2. EUR Real Effective Exchange Rate (REER) which measures actual purchasing power (not nominal price) is going in the opposite direction of USD real purchasing power (RTWEXBGS). 2025/2026 is the largest divergence in history: 10 percentage points in a year.
3. US treasuries is no longer a number 1 foreign reserve asset. EUR reserves grew 2.5x faster than USD reserves when measured in its own absolute terms.
Unlike the Eurozone which maintains a fiscally responsible budget with reasonable debt and a trade surplus, there is simply no foreseeable fix to the problem of ballooning US debt and trade deficits. Nothing can fix the US budget mess.
Anyone who is paying attention to the numbers would certainly have more confidence in EUR over USD.
Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/gold-reserves