(Bloomberg) — Billed on Wall Street as so rock-solid safe they’re risk-free, US Treasury bonds have long served as first port of call for investors during times of panic. They rallied during the global financial crisis, on 9/11 and even when America’s own credit rating was cut.
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But now, as President Donald Trump unleashes an all-out assault on global trade, their status as the world’s safe haven is increasingly coming into question.
Yields, especially on longer-term debt, have surged in recent days while the dollar has plunged. Even more disconcerting is the pattern of the recent market moves. Investors have often dumped 10- and 30-year Treasuries — pushing prices down and yields up — at the very same time they frantically sold stocks, crypto and other risky assets. The inverse is also true, with Treasuries rising in unison with them.
They are trading, in other words, a little like a risky asset themselves. Or, as former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers says, like the debt of an emerging-market country.
Even if this dynamic was to fade as swings in stocks eventually normalize, as most analysts expect, a message has been delivered to policymakers in Washington: Investor confidence in US bonds can no longer be taken for granted — not after a years-long borrowing binge that swelled its debt load and not with a president in the White House hell-bent on rewriting the rules at home and abroad and antagonizing, in the process, many of the country’s biggest creditors.
This has profound implications for the global financial system. As the world’s ‘risk-free’ asset, Treasuries are used as a benchmark to determine the price of everything from stocks to sovereign bonds to mortgage rates, while serving as collateral for trillions of dollars of lending a day.
Treasuries and the dollar get their strength from “the world’s perception of the competence of American fiscal and monetary management and the solidity of American political and financial institutions,” said Jim Grant, founder of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, a widely followed financial newsletter. “Possibly, the world is reconsidering.”
Stocks, bonds and the dollar all tumbled together Thursday, adding to concerns that foreign investors are retreating from US assets en masse. Thirty-year Treasury yields surged 13 basis points to 4.87%, while the dollar plunged against the euro and Swiss franc by the most in a decade.
