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The idea that United States government debt is the one asset every country must hold no matter what is starting to look shakier than it has in decades. For most of the post war period, foreign governments piled into Treasuries…
On 19 August the US Treasury announced it would at least double the size of its long end buyback operations. Yields dropped within minutes. By 1 September the entire move had been surrendered, and the first enlarged operation had still not taken place. Nothing had been bought. Nothing had been repurchased. The policy had not fired a single round, and the market had already finished pricing it out.
Private credit has spent the past year manufacturing its own excuse. Every time a borrower blows up, the postmortem finds some falsified invoice or forged warehouse receipt, and the sector breathes a collective sigh of relief. Fraud, not structure, gets blamed. That story just got harder to tell...
Global financial markets have absorbed one of the most serious geopolitical shocks in decades without the kind of collapse that history would have predicted. A major disruption to Gulf energy supplies, an extended closure of a critical shipping route, elevated inflation, and mounting political uncertainty would once have been almost guaranteed to send oil prices spiraling and tip the world economy into recession.
Every generation of savers gets sold the same fantasy. Put a little away every year, let the magic of compounding do its work, and eventually the curve bends upward toward the moon. It's a comforting story. It is also, for the overwhelming majority of people who try to live by it, false. Understanding why matters more for how you allocate capital today than almost any single stock pick you could make.
Most people arrive at investing through the loudest door. Trading apps, options screenshots, someone on social media posting returns that would make a hedge fund blush. The activities that get the most attention are, almost without exception, the ones with the worst documented outcomes. The activities that produce most of the wealth are boring enough that nobody makes content about them.
There is a story circulating about what happened to government bond markets this August, and it is a good story. It goes like this: the developed world has borrowed more than lenders are willing to fund, buyers have gone on strike, and governments will now respond the way governments always respond, by capping their own borrowing costs and inflating the difference away. Sell your bonds. Buy things instead of promises.
There is a genre of financial content that has learned exactly how to hold your attention. It opens with a real number, layers three plausible-sounding causal steps on top of it, and lands on the collapse of the global monetary order. The current specimen making the rounds combines the $40 trillion debt milestone, the long-bond selloff, and AI capital spending into a single narrative in which the United States is one auction away from insolvency.
For about eighteen months, Leopold Aschenbrenner looked like the man who had worked out the AI trade before anyone else. His hedge fund, Situational Awareness, was built on a thesis that was easy to state and hard to argue with: artificial intelligence would demand an extraordinary quantity of compute, memory, data centre capacity and electricity. If that was right, the companies supplying the physical backbone of the boom stood to be among the decade's biggest winners.
There is a version of the AI financing story that gets told as vendor financing, with Lucent and Nortel as the cautionary tale. Supplier lends to customer, customer buys supplier's product, revenue looks spectacular until the loans go bad and the whole edifice reverses. It is a good story and it is roughly the right shape, but it misses the most important structural feature of what was announced this month, which is that the supplier has arranged for someone else to hold the paper.
