As Donald Trump's threats about annexing Greenland continue to escalate, a Danish pension on Tuesday announced its exit from the US, saying that the president's policies have made investments in the country "not sustainable" in the long term.
Bloomberg spoke with AkademerPension about the decision to abandon US Treasuries for a report published Tuesday. The fund, worth around $25 billion USD, manages savings for teachers and academics in Denmark. By the end of 2025, the fund had roughly $100 million invested in US Treasuries, which it will withdraw by the end of the month in favor of similar alternatives.
“The US is basically not a good credit and long-term the US government finances are not sustainable,” Anders Schelde, chief investment officer at AkademikerPension, told the outlet.
Schelde claimed that "risk and liquidity management" were the only factors motivating the fund to remain invested in US assets, but given the mounting issues in the country, "we decided that we can find alternative to that." He added that Trump's continued rhetoric surrounding Greenland did factor into the decision to a degree, but the concerns about "concerns about fiscal discipline and a weaker dollar" under Trump's leadership were the primary motivator.
Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark situated mostly in the Arctic Circle. Trump has insisted since his first term that the US must gain control of Greenland, which Danish leaders have consistently dismissed, calling the idea a threat to their nation's sovereignty.
Trump's reasoning for wanting control of the island has been vague and inconsistent. At one point, access to Greenland's supplies of key minerals and oil was cited, though critics have pointed out that the cost and effort required to extract these would be more trouble than they are worth. More recently, Trump has claimed that the US "must" control Greenland for "national security" reasons, though he has not been specific about why, and critics have also pointed out that the US already operates military bases on the island and has access to the waters around it for defense purposes.
Susan B. Glasser is a New Yorker staff writer who has conducted extensive interviews with Trump for one of her books, recently claimed that Trump's obsession with controlling Greenland might stem from how large the territory appears on maps. Due to a phenomenon linked to the Mercator projection, land masses far from the Equator, like Greenland, can tend to appear larger than they actually are on certain maps.
“I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’" Trump explained, according to Glasser. "You take a look at a map. So I’m in real estate. I look at a corner, I say, ‘I gotta get that store for the building that I’m building,’ et cetera. You know, it’s not that different. I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this, it’s massive, and that should be part of the United States.’ It’s not different from a real-estate deal. It’s just a little bit larger, to put it mildly.”
