Danish pension fund to sell all U.S. Treasuries, citing fiscal concerns

AkademikerPension, a Denmark-based pension fund managing roughly $25–26 billion, said it will sell its entire holding of U.S. Treasury securities — about $100 million — and complete the exit by the end of January 2026. The chief investment officer, Anders Schelde, framed the move as a reaction to the fiscal trajectory of the United States, saying it was “driven by poor U.S. government finances” and that “the U.S. is basically not a good credit.”

The Treasury stake represents roughly 0.4 percent of the fund’s assets and had been used primarily for liquidity management. Schelde told U.S. television that the decision is “rooted in the poor U.S. government finances” and that the fund will “find alternatives” for liquidity and risk management, adding that the fund plans to pivot toward U.S. dollar holdings and short-duration debt as replacements.

The sale is small in absolute terms relative to the $26 trillion U.S. Treasury market, and pension executives emphasized that they do not expect the transaction alone to move global bond yields. But the decision carries broader symbolic weight: institutional investors that traditionally relied on Treasuries as risk-free liquidity have increasingly factored sovereign credit and policy risk into portfolio construction. Schelde warned that “long-term the U.S. government finances are not sustainable,” signaling a more structural reassessment of Treasuries among some European asset owners.

Analysts point to a string of fiscal indicators that have heightened scrutiny of U.S. public finances. Moody’s downgraded U.S. sovereign credit from Aaa to Aa1 in May 2025, and U.S. budget data showed a 2025 deficit of about $1.78 trillion, a shortfall only marginally smaller than the prior year. Those developments, together with persistent fiscal deficits and political gridlock over long-term fiscal discipline, have amplified concerns about future borrowing costs and the creditworthiness of the federal balance sheet.

The move by AkademikerPension comes amid elevated bilateral tensions between Denmark and the United States over President Donald Trump’s public push to acquire Greenland and threats to impose tariffs on European allies, a backdrop that some say has sharpened political risk calculations. Schelde told reporters the decision was “not directly related to the ongoing rift,” but he acknowledged that the dispute “didn’t make it more difficult to take the decision.”

Within Denmark, other institutional investors have already reduced U.S. Treasury exposure as part of broader rebalancing, a trend that market strategists say reflects both tactical and structural shifts. For now, the direct market effect is likely to be muted: $100 million is a small parcel of global Treasury inventories. Yet the trade matters for what it signals about the erosion of the long-standing assumption that U.S. government debt is the unambiguous global safe-haven.

Traders and portfolio managers will be watching how the fund executes the sale and where liquidity is redeployed. If more institutions follow with similar reweightings into short-duration instruments and dollar assets, the cumulative reallocation could influence demand patterns at the margin and feed into longer-term debates over the pricing of sovereign credit risk and the role of Treasuries in reserve and liquidity portfolios. AkademikerPension has said it will complete the liquidation by the end of January 2026 and will move cash into alternatives suited for short-term liquidity needs.