Marketplace - The EU owns $8 trillion in Treasurys

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

The EU owns $8 trillion in Treasurys. Sure, Eurozone governments probably won’t use ‘em as leverage in the Trump-Greenland situation — and even if they wanted to, it’d be complicated — but what if they did? We’ll explain. Also in this episode: United posts strong quarterly profits after a turbulent year, a primary care doctor tells Kai how Medicaid changes are affecting his work, and cover crops are a tough sell for cash-strapped farmers.Every story has an economic angle. Want some in your inbox? Subscribe to our daily or weekly newsletter.Marketplace is more than a radio show. Check out our original reporting and financial literacy content at marketplace.org — and consider making an investment in our future.

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Discover a career you're passionate about and create a lasting impact. I'm Sherry Holmes. To learn more, visit Skillsonterio.com and start building your future today. The phrase you're looking for here, gang, is Framework Relief Rally. From American Public Media, this is Marketplans. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizzdahl. It is Wednesday, today, 21 January. Good as always to have you long.

everybody. Well, in the space of something like three, maybe four hours at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland today, President Trump went from having to have Greenland with all that that having implies to an as-yet-undefined framework for some kind of as-yet-undefined agreement with NATO about the fate of the world's biggest island. That's the news. The reaction in this program's neck of the woods, was predictable. Markets loved it. Stocks, that is. Bond traders were a bit more blasé, which is interesting because U.S. Treasuries, those government bonds and bills that basically the whole world owns at least a little bit of are among the possible ways that Europe might fight back should the president's mood change. Marketplaces, Subri Beneshishore gets us going.

Europeans own at least $8 trillion worth of U.S. Treasuries. Selling them off would make it harder and more expensive for the U.S. to borrow money to fund all of its spending. There is, however, a problem. These assets are not held predominantly by European governments. They're held by private investors. Josh Lipski at the Atlantic Council says European governments don't have a quick way of forcing private investors to sell their treasuries. Then there's another minor issue.

It would not be in Europe's own economic interest to do something like this. Daniel McDowell is at Syracuse University. U.S. Treasuries back a lot of financial instruments around the world. Any mass sale of treasuries like that would likely cause severe disruptions that would impact not just the U.S. It would also impact European banks and the entire global economy. And on top of that, a lot of Europeans would lose a lot of money because it would basically be a mega flash sale of U.S. Treasuries. Luis Alvarado is at the Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

everybody is going through the exit door at the same time, then it's impossible to get out. And you're going to have to lose a lot in value if you're trying to all sell at the same time. Plus, this would mess with currency markets, make the euro appreciate European goods more expensive. But on the other hand, money isn't everything. Nicola Veron is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

I think we're well past the point where considerations have to be only. of financial and economic nature without consideration of national security. So let's say Europe did decide to burn it all down, force the sell off of treasuries. Where would it put all that money? There is no alternative. Again, Daniel McDowell at Syracuse. There's no other market capable of absorbing that much capital in a short time without major disruptions.

And if European investors, like all investors, want to be where the money is, That leads right back to the U.S. John Canali is at TIA wealth management. The U.S. is the center of AI. We have superior growth track, superior productivity. There are lots of other pain points Europe could hit before selling off treasuries, from tariffs to going after U.S. tech companies. So an official move to unload U.S. debt looks unlikely.

What we might see, though, says the Atlantic Council's Josh Lipsky, is an unofficial, gradual, organic backing away from that debt. There is a move out there, and I think it was already underway before what happened in the past week, to find alternatives to diversify your portfolio. Not a wave, not a catastrophe, just a gradual waning of U.S. financial importance. In New York, I'm Sabrina Benshore for Marketplace. That last bit there? That was important. Wall Street today, as I said, a geopolitical relief rally. We will have the details when we do the numbers.

corporate news is our next destination because the economy never does stop, you know. American commercial aviation, the big name premium airlines anyway, are doing quite nicely. Thank you very much. Delta had an upbeat quarterly report earlier this month. United reported after the close yesterday beat Wall Street's best guesses. Revenue is up both in the front of the plane and in the back where most of us sit. It's revenue per available seat mile. Apologies for the airline jargon.

Their words, not ours. It was highest at the end of last year and into this with the first full week of January setting company records for ticket sales. Looking ahead, though, to the rest of 2026, there might be some unfriendly skies as Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman reports. 2025 wasn't an easy year for airlines, which faced flight cancellations during the government shutdown, a shortage of air traffic controllers, not to mention grumpy, inflation-weary consumers. And yet, says analyst Richard Abu Lafia at Airways, Aerodynamic Advisory. It's kind of like the broader economy, given all the handline news and the negative vibes, you'd think things would be worse than they actually are. There's still a decent level of growth and a very reasonable level of profitability, too. Those profits are coming especially from big spending passengers, both leisure and business. And here, says Morningstar Equity analyst Nicholas Owens, Delta and United are way out in front.

In terms of their ability to provide. perks that they're loyal customers, returning customers, which involves either spending money or miles to go use their lounge or first-class seat or what have you. United, in turn, is spending more to make those passengers in the front of the plane happy, on supercharged Internet and reclining seats and in-flight catering. The airlines aren't passing up an opportunity to squeeze more profit out of the back of the plane, the economy seats, either. Every little thing costs extra, one more.

backpack, picking your seat. Some people might refer to that kind of as nickel and dimming, but it's really just trying to maximize revenue off of a given plane full of seats. Meanwhile, there's one problem facing all airlines, a huge backlog of orders for new planes from Boeing and Airbus, which are struggling with supply chain problems. And flying older planes, explains aerospace consultant Scott Hamilton with Lehm Company, raises airlines' costs for fuel and maintenance. And by the way, this is true. with American, southwest. Delta and United are flying planes that are beginning to approach 30 years in age. And while the airline business overall looks pretty solid right now, Richard Abilafia says

there are still concerns going forward. Global tensions in several places, closed airspace, never good for international travel. But he says as long as middle and upper income consumers are still ready to spend it up on travel, major airlines will do okay. I'm Mitchell Hartman for marketplace. The Trump administration's capture of Nicholas Maduro a couple of weeks ago made all kinds of headlines as it should have. Lost in the hubbub, though, was a tidbit from the world of betting markets. Just hours before that raid, somebody, we don't know who, which is part of the problem, made a bet on Polly Market that Maduro would soon be out of office. The payout was $400,000. dollars. And with such uncanny timing, red flags of the insider trading variety were raised. And that's

not the only instance that has made people sit up and pay attention. So we called Joe Grunfest to talk it over. He's a former commissioner on the Securities and Exchange Commission, also an emeritus professor at Stanford Law School. Professor Grunefest, welcome to the program, sir. It's a pleasure to be with you, Kai. Just to make sure everybody's got the baseline knowledge here. Polymarket and Kalshi and those other betting markets, describe them for me, would you? How do they work. Basically, they're prediction markets. You can take virtually any event. You can transform it into the equivalent of a binary prediction market. Will something happen? Will something not happen? And then you can place a wager, bet, investment, whatever you want to call it, and you wind up getting

paid if you were right. And you wind up losing if you were wrong. It's just like life for that way. Yeah, it is. I'm not being pejorative when I call it a betting market, right? Well, that depends upon who's listening. Some people would be fundamentally insulted. Other people would say, no, that's fine. All right. No matter the nomenclature, let's talk about the rules. Are there rules about what you can do, about what you can, cannot bet in, bet on all of those, you know, standard sort of securities, kinds of questions? Well, the answer to that is yes and no. On Polly Market, which currently exists primarily outside the United States and is crypto-native, the question of what are the rules is really a great question. Calcci is a different creature. Calci exists in the United States,

and it's subject to regulations by the CFTC and commodity market regulations, which are, you know, in some way slightly different from what you get in traditional securities markets. As the securities guy in this conversation, a retired professor of the law of it and a former Securities and Exchange Commission guy, how worried are you about the flexibility of regulation? in this stuff. Well, I sleep like a baby, Kai. Yeah, but you're retired. You know, I got other, I got other things to worry about than this, because in the great scheme of things, as a practical matter, the people that are going to polymarket pretty much know that they're operating in a market that is very, very different than a U.S. regulated securities market. They understand that.

There'll be disputes, but they pretty much are eyes wide open in terms of the risks that they're taking by buying into that market. I appreciate that their eyes are wide open, but as we've talked about on this program, and as you've surely read elsewhere, these markets, whether it's polymarket culture or anything else, are expanding into very specific civil society kinds of questions about elections. And yes, I know you can bet on elections now already. But are you not worried about the corrosion here? When these markets get bigger, yes, I will. And the concern will be a little bit like point-shadding a basketball. You know, so, for example, there's concern that Carolyn Levitt cut one of her briefings short a week or two ago because there was a contract,

and if she would have gone on for another 10, 15 seconds, one side would have paid off relative to the other. Now, my concern about that is relatively low because the amount of money at stake in that contract was virtually trivial. But when these things grow, you're going to have more concern about the equivalent of point shaving in just about every one of the markets that supports some kind of event contract outcome. So with an appreciation that the government of the United States right now, with the exception of whatever President Trump decides to do unilaterally on any given day, is basically paralyzed and regulation and new legislation are extremely difficult, do you imagine a time when people are going to try to regulate this stuff like the SEC regulates Wall Street?

A short answer to that is yes. There's a certain live regulation that already exists. And the question in many ways is not what are the regulations, but how intelligently and aggressively they are enforced. We've got the rules. Are we smart about applying them? Yeah, answer your own question for me, sir, would you? We can do better. Yeah. Joe Grunfest used to teach at Stanford. Used to be on the Securities Exchange Commission. Now he's just answer my questions. Professor, thanks for your time, sir. I appreciate it. More than a pleasure. Coming up. This was the bees' needs, you know, back in the 80s. Some things never go out of style,

but first, let's do the numbers. Down Industrial's up 588 today. I didn't know if we were going to get the really happy music today, huh? One and two-tenth percent, 49,000 77. The NASDAQ added 270 points, 1.2%,

finished at 23,224. The S&P 5,00 up 78 points, also 1.2%. That's a trifecta there. Ended things at 6875. President Trump's proposed 10% cap on credit card interest rates were supposed to have gone into effect yesterday. It's not a law or an executive order. It's just the president talking, so there's no sign banks are complying at this point. In Davos today, J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Diamond said capping rates would spell, and this is a quote, economic disaster, which, of course, JPMorgan Chase dropped a quarter percent. Of course, he would say that. Capital One, which reports earnings tomorrow after the close, up 1 percent. City Group picked up nine-tenths of one percent. Mitchell was talking airlines. United increased two and two-tenths percent. American Airlines, up two point four percent. Bonds up. Yields down, yield on the tenure T-note, 4.25 percent. That is, in mere four basis points. Not too much at all. You're listening to Marketplace. Ever wish you could sit in on a private conversation between the world's top CEO, The podcast Long Strange Trip, CEO, opens the door to the kind of candid behind closed doors discussions you won't hear anywhere else.

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Skillsonario.com and you're to batire your name from today. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. There's a family

physician in Logan, Ohio. named Scott Anzolone, who we started talking to back in 2019. We've touched base a couple of times since, mostly about health care in rural America, which has its special challenges. And we got to think in the other day with Affordable Care Act subsidy cuts in the news that we were overdue for a call. So we picked up the phone. Dr. Anzolone, welcome back to the program.

It's good to talk to you again. Yeah, nice to talk to you again. It has been three and a half-ish years since you and I have talked, which is longer than we usually go for our regulars. in 45 seconds, what's been happening? Oh, we got through COVID, which was quite quite the chore. Last time we talked, I think I was on my own still here in Smalltown, Logan, by myself. Since then, I was actually able to acquire a new partner.

Finally, after about six or seven years, searching for someone willing to come and work in a small town, she's been here now since about a year since August. And I also, I'm not in private, well, I am in private practice, but it's little different model. I was the last one in private practice in Southern Ohio and just was struggling making it in the current environment. And I've joined an organization called Northern Ohio Medical Specialties, which is a physician-owned, physician-directed organization. And I've been with them since April of 24, I believe. Tell me about aligning your practice with this partnership group. Why? Why'd you do it?

Well, I knew I had to do something. In today's market, in today's health care arena that we live in, the insurance companies have us all by the throat. The squeeze is just on in every direction. And costs keep going up and reimbursement keeps going down. And I probably would have kept limping on for as long as I could. But, you know, I needed to also look at my future, my retirement, and my patients. And this was a way that I can guarantee that if something happens to me,

if I get ill or, you know, I want to retire someday, my patients will have a, you know, they'll be care. for. They won't just be dumped on the street because if I would leave, we'd have a large void for care here. Four thousand patients without a doctor, right? Right. We have other physicians in town, but not enough to absorb that. So I needed to protect that. And this was a way to do that. And I now also have a central office that can help me do a lot of the day-to-day things, so I'm not doing the payroll at 10 o'clock at night on Sunday. Stuff like that. You know, it allows us to stay independent, but have all the support we need.

It's kind of none of my business, but I'm going to try it anyway. How old are you? 57. So at some point, reasonably soon, you're going to start thinking about retirement. Right. What does that look like for you? Oh, honestly, this sounds crazy, but one of the things that will keep me from retiring is not having health insurance for myself. It's kind of a...

Says the doctor. Exactly. And I look at it. Right now, we have our health care through my wife. She's an art teacher in our local school district. And she's younger than I am. But, you know, I have health insurance through our company as provided, but I'm one of the owners. And, you know, we pay 100% of our insurance.

So we go from, you know, paying a couple hundred dollars a month through my wife to paying, you know, $13 to $1,800 a month. Just some premiums. So I do look at that. And it's like, when can I afford to retire? I got to make sure I have healthier insurance. And I hear that every day from all my patients even. And like, well, I want to retire, but I don't have health insurance if I retire. It all seems to be centered around health care and health insurance.

Why do you think this issue of health care in the United States? And look, your guy's been doing this for 35 years. And you're a practitioner, right? You're not a policy guy, but you know what you're talking about. Why isn't this higher on the list of things that our elected leaders care about? That's a good question. I think they care about it. But I don't think anyone has a good answer for it.

I also do believe that a lot of our politicians, at least in Washington, are out of touch because they have top-notch insurance and health care. If they had to receive the same insurance their constituents get, I do believe they might see it differently and maybe act differently. And then, you know, stepping back and looking at just recently with the subsidy cuts and everything, that's still a very small percentage of the population in our country that gets their insurance through the marketplace. It's like 7%, 10%. They have $8, $10, $20,000 deductibles. So even though they have insurance, they don't have insurance for day-to-day needs. But our politicians, you know, our legislators, I don't know. I think they really, I think they're out of touch.

I always said that if our elected leaders had term limits, had to receive the insurance that the constituents they represent get, and the salary average that the constituents get, I think we'd see a different outcome. That's my solution. those three things. Dr. Scott Anzlone. He's in Logan, Ohio.

His family practice is called Stagecoach family menace. Scott, thanks a lot. I appreciate your time. Thanks for talking to me. I was interviewing a farmer once. We were actually on his farm standing next to his barn.

And I wanted to get a closer look at his crop. So I said, hey, let's go stand on the dirt over there. And he looked at me, and he said, soil. It's soil.

I haven't made that mistake. stakes since, obviously, but the point is that that soil was his livelihood, and he and other farmers do everything they can to keep their soil healthy. One way they do that is through something called regenerative agriculture, cover crops in our example today. But farming's a tough industry where margins are small. So as KBIA's Hano-Ros-Schleiss reports, farmers are going to be wanting a better bang for their buck. Inside a barn in southwest Missouri, farmer McCormer Cully Kincaid operates a massive and noisy seed mill. Kincaid is the second generation in his family to cultivate crops for seed production,

and he's still using the technology his uncle invested in 40 years ago. This version here is actually like a 1980s version. This was the bees' needs, you know, back in the 80s. Recently harvested barley seeds flow through pipes and sift down four levels of screens. Kincaid conducts a rigorous seed testing and cleaning process so his product can be certified. And this is the final product you get. You get larger seeds, very clean, and little to no weed seeds. And that's where you want to be. From the mill, the seeds are bagged and sold to be planted by farmers throughout the Midwest.

Kincaid sells cover crops, vegetation that grows in the offseason to keep otherwise bare ground covered to reduce erosion and retain moisture. Keeping a living root in the ground for as much of the year as possible is a tenet of regenerative agriculture, a movement that aims to farm with nature and reduce dependence on chemicals. But cover crops can be a tough sell for farmers. It's expensive and could take years for those environmental benefits to appear. Can the operator and can the farm absorb the risk that comes with doing something new, knowing that it might take a few years for the full point. profitability to be seen. Jennifer Simmelink is a farmer and executive director of the Kansas Soil Health Alliance. She says cover crops don't earn a farmer a traditional income, but rather they're an investment in the soil. And that delayed return can be a barrier. It's easier to see money gained than money saved. Even if cover crops result in long-term gains for soil health, they could be a flop

in the short term if the crop doesn't align with weather, soil, and climate conditions. It's so hard to put out, if you plant this, this will be your results, because it can vary. But what if there was less variability? Solvei Hanson is working with the University of Missouri Center for Regenerative Agriculture to create new cover crop varieties. Then we plant them in nurseries, we observe them, we select the best ones, and advance them. Researchers hope to develop seeds that can thrive in specific regions, climates, and soil conditions, and would help farmers adopt regenerative agriculture methods. Hansen says this essentially name-brand seed could be seen as less of a gamble than untested,

unclean seed mixtures of unknown quality. What there's market space for really translates into what farmers see value in. Much of what farmers already grow can be used as a cover crop, wheat, barley, rye, so long as it suits the environment. Walking through his field in southwest Missouri, McCulley Kincaid says he's a successful cover crop seed salesman because he uses a variety of them himself. Here's okra, here's kale, this right here's watermelon.

Kincaid says his cover crops improve the health of his soil and produce erosion on his farm. Plus, it's dinner for his cows. In Jasper, Missouri, I'm Janer Rose Schleis for Marketplace. This final note on the way out today, just a quick check of sorts on the global economic zeitgeist, where people are putting their money as a proxy for how they are feeling. Where they're putting it is in gold, $4,831 an ounce today, and that is after the framework. Our media production includes Brian Allison, John Fokie, Montana Johnson, Drew Jostad, Gary O'Keefe, and Charlton Thorpe.

Rizdahl, we will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is 8 p.m. Ready to make the most of your money? Sign up to receive weekly tips from Marketplace designed to help you make smarter financial decisions. Plus, you'll also be the first to know about exclusive

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