Stay informed with free updates

Just sign up to US equities myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.

The writer is the chair of Rockefeller International. His latest book is ‘What Went Wrong With Capitalism’

When it comes to the US, investors around the world love to Bash All Day, Buy All Night. Traveling recently throughout Asia, Europe and the Middle East, I was struck by the increasing intensity of complaints about America under Donald Trump, from its tariffs to Greenland’s designs and apparent disregard for the old global order. Polls show a similar erosion, with favorable opinions of the US falling around the world.

Then I went back to New York, looked at the numbers and saw that, although the opinions in the US were falling, money was flowing like never before. Last year foreigners poured nearly $1.6tn into US financial assets, including nearly $700bn in stocks, both new records and well above levels in recent years. The story is the same for US corporate bonds, with foreign buying strong.

But for a short “Sell America” ​​wave in April, foreigners are big buyers every month in 2025. They are aggressively “buying to break through,” like US retail traders. From Singapore to Seoul, they stay up all night to trade on the most popular US trading platforms after hours.

Among the few foreigners sitting on this purchase are central banks, which transfer money from dollars to gold. And a new sign of caution in 2025 is that global investors are hedging more of their unprecedentedly large exposure to the dollar than last year. Foreign institutions alone now own nearly 15 percent of US stocks, a record share and up half from the level a decade ago.

So why do people buy so much from a country they claim to despise the most? One reason is the lack of reason. Until recently, the US has consistently outperformed the rest of the world since the global financial crisis of 2008, so many investors are still chasing past performance. They think there is “no alternative” to investing in US markets, given their vast scale and liquidity.

The rest of the world also remains in awe of the US’s technological lead. While Europeans have long been perhaps the most enthusiastic buyers of American technology stocks, it is remarkable that the single largest source of foreign inflows to the US stock market last year was South Korea, where anger for assets tied to America or AI is intense.

Market trends don’t last forever and the Bash All Day, Buy All Night habit is unlikely to be any different. The mania for AI stocks in the US raises existential questions, as it is not clear which companies will win the AI ​​arms race, or that they will be American. China has shown that it can compete, with some of the AI ​​models offering similar performance, at a cheaper training cost.

If AI mania takes off, American assets will be hit the hardest. More than half of the US economic growth last year can be explained by the billions of US companies investing in AI infrastructure, and the waves of capital flowing into US financial assets.

Meanwhile, in response to America’s market dominance and unpredictability, other governments are looking to diversify their risk. They cut bilateral trade deals, deregulation and increased investment in defense and domestic technology. Despite heavy capital inflows to the US last year, markets in the rest of the world outperformed the US by large margins.

Momentum is picking up as growth outside the US picks up. This year and next, economies in the rest of the world are expected to grow at one and a half times the pace of the US, widening this gap compared to recent years. And through 2027, average or “equally” weighted corporate income is set to grow twice as fast in emerging markets, and 50 percent faster in other developed markets.

America’s spending habits are more than ever the sentiment of strangers. Last year, foreign portfolio inflows were large enough to finance the entire U.S. current account deficit — and then some. The last time this happened was in the mid-2000s, when US markets were not that big and neither was the deficit. The extent of US dependence on speculative foreign capital has never been higher.

Despite all the bashing of America, foreigners now own nearly $70tn of US assets, double the level of a decade ago. And last year, most of the flows came as “hot money.” Foreign direct investment in factories and businesses, which cannot be withdrawn immediately, is weaker than a portfolio that flows into assets such as stocks and bonds, which can be reversed in an instant. If the world were to cut American purchases overnight, the impact could shock US markets.