The 10-year Treasury yield is perhaps the most important financial benchmark in the global fiat system, as it drives valuations and market trends worldwide. It is widely—and erroneously—regarded as the risk-free rate of return.
The 10-year Treasury yield can be thought of as a key barometer of the US dollar-based fiat system—a critical measure akin to its beating heart.
Bond yields move inversely to bond prices. When bond prices fall, bond yields rise.
A rising 10-year Treasury yield signals trouble for the US dollar because it means investors are selling Treasuries, which pushes up the US government’s borrowing costs. That is why the 10-year Treasury yield is a major pain point for the US government.
The 10-year Treasury yield was 3.97% when the war started. Now it is around 4.60%, an increase of roughly 63 basis points.
I expect the 10-year Treasury yield to keep climbing over the coming weeks and months—until it forces the Fed’s hand. At that point, the intervention will be sold as “stability,” but the mechanism will be familiar: suppress yields by debasing the currency.
At today’s debt levels, every 1 basis point increase in the government’s average borrowing cost adds roughly $3.9 billion in annual interest expense. So a 63 bps rise is not trivial—it translates to nearly $250 billion in additional yearly interest costs, materially widening a 2025 budget deficit that was already around $1.8 trillion.
Higher yields mean the US government must pay tens or even hundreds of billions more in interest on its debt. At the same time, the global economy faces even greater added costs because Treasury rates serve as the benchmark for borrowing worldwide.
That is not an insignificant move. However, given all the headwinds I have discussed, I suspect the 10-year Treasury yield is headed much higher because investors will demand higher yields to compensate for rising inflation. Further, if Hormuz remains closed, drastically higher oil prices are all but certain. Higher energy prices mean higher prices across the economy and higher official inflation rates, which means investors will demand still higher yields to compensate.
The problem is that interest on the federal debt is already over $1.2 trillion and is now the second-largest item in the budget. The US government cannot afford yields going much higher because the interest expense would push it toward bankruptcy.
I am not sure how—or even if—the US government can manage this situation. Something has to give, and we will not have to wait long to find out what.
The Iran war may prove to be more than another foreign policy disaster. It could be the trigger that exposes the fragility of the entire dollar-based financial system.
Your COVID mRNA vaccine may have accidentally helped fight cancer.
MD Anderson studied 884 lung cancer patients on immunotherapy. 180 of them got a COVID mRNA vaccine within 100 days of starting treatment.
Results (AACR 2026):
- Vaccinated group: 37.3 months median survival
- Unvaccinated group: 20.6 months
- Nearly doubled.
The mechanism: mRNA acts like a siren for your immune system. It floods the body with type 1 interferon and upregulates PD-L1, the exact protein that checkpoint drugs target. The vaccine didn't fight COVID here. It supercharged the cancer treatment.
This wasn't planned. It was discovered by accident in retrospective data. But 884 patients is not a small number.
Three BCM lessons:
1.Manual fallbacks must be pre-tested, not improvised
2.Two incidents in 12 months means the threat model was wrong, not unlucky
3.Plan for the scenario where everything fails, not just the one you’re comfortable with.
#BCM#CyberResilience#CapitalMarkets
In November 2023, LockBit hit ICBC Financial Services — the US arm of the world’s largest bank.
The result: US Treasury trades couldn’t clear. Settlement instructions were hand-delivered via USB stick across Manhattan.
Let’s talk about what that tells us about #BCM. 🧵
The SEC responded in December 2024: settled charges for deficient recordkeeping — four months of non-compliance post-attack.
This is the chronic phase most BCPs don’t model. The acute incident ends. The regulatory tail begins.
ICBC’s BCP closed too early.
Allianz survey (3,300+ risk professionals): 51% rank supply chain paralysis from geopolitical conflict as most plausible Black Swan. 47% cite a global internet outage second.
#BCM#BlackSwan
https://t.co/6HsNeKxfbr
An incident or a problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens the organization’s core objectives. In the #polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more o…https://t.co/wt7tw31HQ0 https://t.co/iCSFb1QdrP