The hopes of European investors who abandoned the markets of their continent and turned to the United States are ultimately proving groundless, at the same time wealthier Americans are also abandoning US assets.
The core slogan of the 47th US president, Donald Trump, was the well-known MAGA, Make America Great Again. At the heart of this strategy was the pursuit of restoring the American economy to its former global dominance.
In late 2025, the share of the United States in global GDP stood, according to estimates by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, at 14.65%.
Forty years earlier, in 1985, the corresponding percentage amounted to 35.32%, while during the first post-war years the US produced more than half of global GDP.
Despite their strong image, the position of the United States in the global economy has been steadily weakening for decades.
Donald Trump attempted to reverse this course through a series of radical economic interventions.
The central axis of his policy was the imposition of high retaliatory tariffs, aiming to protect the domestic market from foreign competition and restart industrial production within the US.
At the same time, the American president estimated that the creation of a strong protective wall around the American economy would encourage both foreign and American investors to bring production activities back inside the country.
He repeatedly addressed a message to international businesses saying, move your production to the United States and the tariff rate will be zero.
The influx of capital and the tariff war
According to data from the US Department of the Treasury, net placements by foreign investors in long-term American assets amounted to 1.55 trillion dollars in 2025, increased by approximately 31% compared to 2024, when they had stood at 1.18 trillion dollars.
The largest net influx of capital originated from Europe and reached 872.8 billion dollars. European investors were influenced both by American trade protectionism and by the ongoing deterioration of the economic situation in the European economy.
However, this trend now appears to be reversing.
In international investment circles, the slogan Sell America is gaining ground.
The phrase began to appear already since last year, when Moody's downgraded the credit rating of the United States from AAA to AA1 on May 16.
At that time, the markets reacted in a limited way.
The discussion, however, was reignited following the publication of an article in the New York Times on January 31 titled, Sell America Is the New Trade on Wall Street.
According to the publication, investors appear increasingly cautious toward the American economy for a number of reasons.
First and most fundamental is the decline of the dollar against other major currencies.
This development is considered an inevitable consequence of the Trump strategy to boost American exports and limit the trade deficit.
By late 2025, the dollar had lost approximately 10% of its value against major currencies.
At the same time, the momentum of Wall Street has begun to slow, the borrowing costs of the US Treasury have increased, while gold prices surged by 75% within a year as investors turned to precious metals as a safe haven.
Wealthy Americans are leaving too
At the same time, larger family offices worldwide are planning the most significant changes in their investment placements in years, with a primary trend being the reduction of exposure to the United States and the search for new investment destinations.
According to the new UBS Global Family Office Report, approximately 60% of family offices intend to proceed with strategic changes in their asset allocation within the next 12 months, a percentage nearly double compared to the average of the last five years.
Among those planning changes, the dominant trend is limiting exposure to American assets and strengthening placements in emerging markets.
On a global level, North America is the only region where family offices state that they intend to reduce their investments over the next twelve months.
Conversely, they appear willing to increase their presence in Latin America and Africa.
The head of private wealth management at UBS for the Americas, John Mathews, notes that investment anxiety has changed character within a year.
As he explains, last year the main anxiety of family offices concerned global trade tensions and tariffs.
Today, however, the focus is on geopolitical conflicts, the increase in public debt, interest rates, and the long-term consequences of these developments for the global economy.
The terror scenarios for financial markets
The retreat of investment interest toward the US reflects a broader shift of the largest private investment offices in the world.
The high concentration of the American stock market, fears over a potential bubble in artificial intelligence, trade tariffs, the weakening of the dollar, instability in economic policy, and the rise of public debt and US bond yields are pushing more and more investors to reduce their exposure to the US.
Investment advisers clarify, however, that this is not a mass trade of the Sell America type. Instead, international investors primarily seek greater geographical diversification, as global crises become increasingly complex and interconnected.
The wars in Ukraine and Iran, continuous changes in tariffs, tensions around immigration, and fiscal conflicts have transformed the global investment environment into an exceptionally complicated landscape.
The new dominant trend in the field of family offices is the so-called jurisdictional diversification, meaning the geographical dispersion of assets across multiple countries and legal jurisdictions with the goal of risk mitigation.
According to the UBS survey, two-thirds of family offices now maintain their banking and investment assets in at least three different jurisdictions.
Nearly one-third allocates its funds across four or more regions, among which are Latin America, the United States, China, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
A central objective for many family offices is now also the reduction of exposure to the US dollar, a process that several analysts already characterize as de-dollarization.
More than a quarter of family offices state that they plan to limit their placements in assets denominated in dollars.
At the same time, approximately two-thirds estimate that the role of the dollar as the dominant global reserve currency will weaken in the coming years, while nearly half of investors consider that they are already excessively exposed to the American currency.
As basic currencies for diversification, the Swiss franc and the euro are preferred.
The most significant threat for the next 12 months, as well as for the next five years, is considered to be geopolitical uncertainty.
In the second place of risks ranks the risk of a global trade war, while high on the list are also hyperinflation, cyberattacks, and public debt crises.
As noted in the UBS report, these conditions force investors to prepare not only for short-term volatility but for a prolonged period of high and mutually reinforcing risk.
For this reason, family offices are now placing emphasis on the creation of risk-resilient portfolios through a combination of new asset allocation and multi-geographic presence strategies.
The investment placements showing the greatest momentum concern emerging market equities, investments in infrastructure, and placements in gold.
Conversely, an intention to reduce cash holdings as well as to limit exposure to the real estate sector is recorded.
At the same time, an increasingly larger divergence is shaping between American family offices and those operating outside the US.
American family offices remain strongly oriented toward the domestic market, increasing their exposure to the United States from 86% to 88% within the last year.
Overall, North America continues to gather 53% of global family investment capital.
However, family offices outside the US are following a different path, returning capital to their domestic markets or directing it toward other international regions.
A characteristic example is Chinese family offices, which now invest approximately half of their assets in Western Europe.
Correspondingly, family offices of Western Europe maintain approximately 41% of their funds within the European market.
As John Mathews points out, American family offices essentially doubled down on their confidence in the United States.
Conversely, most international family offices are now choosing a gradual diversification away from assets denominated in dollars and a limitation of their exposure to the American economy.
Concerns over prolonged destabilization
The flight of capital from the United States is linked to deeper concerns: the stability of American markets in periods of geopolitical instability, pressures toward the Federal Reserve of the US, the swelling of public debt, and fears over the weakening of institutional guarantees of the rule of law.
Particular emphasis is given to the contradictions of the Trump economic strategy.
On the one hand, boosting exports requires a weaker dollar. On the other hand, attracting foreign capital presupposes a strong currency.
Correspondingly, maintaining demand for American government bonds requires high interest rates from the Federal Reserve, yet reducing the cost of servicing public debt presupposes exactly the opposite, lower interest rates.
According to critics of the Trump policy, the economic strategy of the government does not constitute a coherent plan for the reconstruction of the American economy but a set of conflicting slogans.
During the last year, the European economy was frequently at the center of pessimistic forecasts. However, developments in the US lead many analysts to the conclusion that investors underestimated the risks of the American economy.
The main European stock market index Stoxx 600 and the American S&P 500 recorded similar gains of approximately 15% in nominal terms within a year.
However, when the performance of the European index is calculated in dollars, the rise touches 30%.
Last year, investors were trying to choose between the bad and the worse. Many considered that Europe was the greater problem. Today, several analysts estimate that the United States is developing into the most serious factor of concern.
At the New York Life Investments conference, it was stressed that investors no longer possess safe geographical outlets and that the only realistic option is portfolio diversification with a reduction of exposure to American assets.
At the same time, more and more American analyses speak of a deterioration of the investment environment in the US.
The billionaire investor Ray Dalio, founder of the largest American hedge fund Bridgewater, warned in an interview with the New York Times that the American economy risks finding itself faced with a serious cardiac episode within the next five years.
Dalio identifies three main risks.
The first is the explosive increase in US public debt. For the first time since World War II, the public debt of the US reached the height of the annual GDP of the country.
The public debt amounts today in real terms to approximately 31.22 trillion dollars, while if intra-governmental debt is also added, the total debt now exceeds 39 trillion dollars or approximately 125% of GDP.
During the election period of 2024, Donald Trump had pledged that he would halt the increase in debt. However, from his return to the White House until today, American debt has increased by more than 2.5 trillion dollars.
The expenditures for servicing the debt are increasing at a rapid pace. At the end of the fiscal year 2025, interest payments corresponded to 14% of total government expenditures, surpassing defense expenditures for the first time.
During the first quarter of the fiscal year 2026, interest expenditures amounted to 537 billion dollars or nearly 30% of total government expenditures.
The second major risk concerns internal political and social instability in the US.
Analysts consider it likely that the Republicans will lose control of the House of Representatives in the upcoming midterm elections, a fact which will significantly weaken the ability of Donald Trump to implement his political agenda.
The famous market guru Ray Dalio আদ warns that growing social polarization can lead even to widespread incidents of violence, pointing out characteristically that in the United States there are more guns than people.
The third factor of concern is the growing global geopolitical instability.
According to the analysis, the foreign policy of the Trump government reinforces the international climate of uncertainty and places the United States itself at the center of geopolitical tensions.
A characteristic example is the American involvement in the war with Iran.
The Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stated that within two months the conflict cost the US approximately 25 billion dollars, while according to estimates from Tehran, the real cost approaches 100 billion dollars.
Beyond the economic cost, however, the conflict is considered to have severely damaged the international prestige of the United States and, by extension, its investment credibility.
Particular importance is also acquired by the shift of the Persian Gulf countries. Last year, Saudi Arabia and other monarchies of the region had pledged investments of hundreds of billions of dollars in the US.
Now, however, according to analysts, these commitments are considered uncertain, as the countries of the region appear dissatisfied both with the economic losses and with the Trump policy.
According to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the US Department of Commerce, the net international investment position of the United States, meaning the difference between American investments abroad and foreign investments in the US, remains intensely negative.
When Donald Trump returned to the White House, the net surplus of foreign investments in the American economy amounted to 26.4 trillion dollars, an amount nearly equal to the annual GDP of the US.
During the second and third quarters of 2025, this surplus increased further by 1.5 and 1.4 trillion dollars respectively.
However, in the fourth quarter of 2025, a small but symbolic decrease by 11 billion dollars was recorded for the first time.
For many analysts, this constitutes the first indication that the era of Buy America may be giving its place to a new era of Sell America, where capital outflows from the United States begin to exceed inflows.
Although official data for the first quarter of 2026 are not yet available, several economists estimate that the trend of moving investment capital away from the American economy is strengthening at a rapid pace.
www.bankingnews.gr
Σχόλια αναγνωστών