Dutch Pension Giant ABP Pulled €25 Billion Out of US Assets, Slashed Treasury Holdings 75%

Europe's largest pension fund just made one of the biggest bets against US government debt in recent memory. ABP, which manages retirement money for Dutch civil servants and teachers and oversees roughly €531 billion in assets, cut its US Treasury holdings from €19 billion to €4.6 billion between late 2025 and March 2026, according to figures reported by Crypto Briefing and KuCoin. That's a 75% reduction.

The fund didn't stop at bonds. ABP also trimmed about €10 billion from its US equity portfolio, bringing it down to €101.8 billion, with reported divestments in Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple. Combined with the Treasury cuts, ABP moved close to €25 billion out of US assets in roughly six months.

Where did the money go? Mostly to Germany. ABP now holds approximately €40 billion in German government bonds, with about €6 billion of the shifted Treasury allocation landing specifically in bunds. France, the Netherlands, and Belgium also picked up inflows. European assets now sit at 37.2% of ABP's portfolio, about €198 billion, versus 32.2% in US holdings.

This isn't a one-off. Earlier in 2025, ABP had already cut its Treasury stake by €10 billion, meaning the fund's total pullback from American fixed income over the past year and a half is larger than the six-month headline number suggests.

Why ABP Is Doing This

Two things are driving the move, according to Crypto Briefing and KuCoin, which both cite the same underlying data. The first is a Dutch pension system overhaul designed to stabilize retiree payouts. Because ABP ultimately pays beneficiaries in euros, the new framework favors euro-denominated assets to cut currency risk. That's a structural, regulatory reason that has nothing to do with any political opinion about the United States.

The second is a straightforward value call. ABP's investment team apparently decided German bunds and other eurozone sovereign debt now offer a better risk-reward trade than US Treasuries. That's a bet on relative pricing, not a political statement.

This is one large pension fund reallocating for its own regulatory and financial reasons. One fund's rebalancing does not constitute a broad exodus from US assets by foreign institutions generally. No source in this reporting shows other major pension funds following ABP's exact playbook, and treating one fund's rebalancing as a trend requires more data than is available here.

Bessent's Buyback Expansion Draws Fire

The ABP shift lands in the same window as a separate fight over the US Treasury market: Secretary Scott Bessent's decision to expand government buybacks of long-dated debt. The Treasury Department announced it would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations, from a maximum of $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation, covering securities in the 10-to-20-year and 20-to-30-year sectors. The change takes effect September 9 and runs until November 4, when Treasury is scheduled to provide further guidance, according to the Daily Wire.

Stanley Druckenmiller, Bessent's former boss and mentor, tore into the move in written comments cited by the Daily Wire. "The long-term Treasury yield is the most important price in the world. It is also the only fiscal disciplinarian the U.S. has left," he wrote, adding that "every basis point of artificial yield suppression is a subsidy to procrastination."

Nohshad Shah, head of fixed-income sales at Citadel Securities, made a similar case: "The durable solution is not repeated intervention, but harder choices on fiscal policy and central banks willing to get ahead of inflation, including, if necessary, by hiking rates." He argued that "preventing Treasuries from clearing at lower prices does not eliminate that pressure. It merely shifts it elsewhere."

Lisa Shalett, chief investment officer at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, called it a short-term gimmick in a client note, and an LPL Financial fixed income strategist told the Daily Wire, "This is a Band-Aid. This doesn't really fix the problem." Mike Sanders of Madison Investments said his worry is that "the market is going to try to fight them on it at a certain point."

Not everyone on Wall Street is against it. Portfolio manager Vincent Ahn told the Daily Wire that "Bessent seems willing to use balance-sheet tools more aggressively when the ultralong end starts deteriorating," framing the buybacks as a reasonable liquidity backstop rather than yield manipulation.

None of the sources here directly connect ABP's selling to Bessent's buyback expansion. ABP's reallocation traces to Dutch pension reform and a relative-value call on European bonds. The Treasury buyback expansion traces to concerns about liquidity and pricing at the long end of the US curve. They are two separate stories that happen to be unfolding at the same time, both pointing to real strain in demand for long-dated US government debt.

The open question is whether ABP's move is a preview of what other large European pension funds do as their own regulatory reforms phase in, or whether it's a one-fund story tied to the Netherlands' specific pension overhaul. Treasury's own buyback program runs through November 4, when the department is due to say what comes next.