全球债市同步抛售：我们是否站在另一个拐点？

Author: Xiaobing, Shenchao TechFlow

On May 19, during intraday trading, the U.S. 30-year Treasury yield surged to 5.177%, its highest level since August 2007.

The last time a new 30-year Treasury bond was issued with a coupon rate of 5% was also in August 2007. Two months later, two hedge funds under Bear Stearns collapsed, triggering the subprime mortgage crisis. This isn't to say that history necessarily rhymes, but when the world's largest, deepest, and most "risk-free" asset market pulls its yield back to levels seen on the eve of a financial tsunami, you had better understand what is actually happening.

What's more alarming is that this time, it's not just the U.S.

Not Just the U.S. Yields Rising; Global Bonds are Being Dumped

If it were only U.S. Treasury yields rising, the story would be simpler – the market pricing in inflation and anticipating Fed rate hikes, nothing more.

But what happened over the past week is on a completely different scale.

From May 15 to 18, long-term government bond yields across major developed countries experienced a rare "coordinated surge":

Japan's 30-year government bond yield broke through 4%, reaching an all-time high since the instrument was issued in 1999. The UK's 30-year gilt yield climbed to its highest level since March 1998. Germany's 10-year bund yield hit its highest point since May 2011.

If you overlay these charts, you see a chilling picture: bond traders in Tokyo, London, Frankfurt, and New York, across four time zones, all made the same decision in the same week: sell.

According to Bloomberg, this was the worst week for U.S. Treasuries since the Trump tariff shock in April 2025, with the 30-year yield approaching its cyclical peak from 2023.

Bond traders are the most conservative group on the planet. When this group starts selling in unison, the market senses not just panic, but something structural beginning to loosen.

What Simultaneously Hammered Global Bond Markets?

Laying out all the clues, three main threads intertwine:

Thread One: Oil.

The U.S.-Iran war erupted at the end of February, and tensions in the Strait of Hormuz have persisted for nearly three months. April's U.S. CPI hit a three-year high year-over-year, and PPI recorded its largest gain since early 2022, up 6% year-over-year. This isn't a mild return of inflation; it's a clear second shock.

The logic for bondholders is straightforward: if inflation can't be suppressed over the next five years, locking in a fixed coupon for 30 years means losing purchasing power for every additional year held. So, the choice is either to sell, or to force the issuer to offer a higher coupon as compensation.

This explains why the selling is concentrated in long-dated bonds – 10-year, 20-year, 30-year. The longer the maturity, the more sensitive it is to inflation.

Thread Two: Debt.

The U.S. government's fiscal deficit continues to expand, requiring the Treasury to issue more debt. Auctions for 3-year and 10-year notes saw weaker-than-expected demand, indicating that investors' capacity to absorb the massive supply of Treasuries is being tested as yields keep climbing.

Supply is ramping up, but demand is shrinking. Foreign central banks, especially the largest buyers of U.S. Treasuries over the past two decades, are reducing their holdings. This is a crucial shift: Treasuries no longer have a natural buyer.

Japan faces a similar situation. The market worries the Japanese government may need to introduce an extra budget to cope with economic pressures, worsening deficit expectations. The UK's troubles are more direct; Prime Minister Starmer's political crisis has further shaken market confidence in UK fiscal discipline, pushing the 30-year gilt yield to a 28-year high.

Thread Three: Central Banks' "Credibility Issue."

This is the most subtle layer.

At its latest meeting, the Federal Reserve held the federal funds rate steady in the 3.5%-3.75% range. Surprisingly, there was internal dissent, with 3 of the 12 voting members publicly opposing the dovish lean in the statement. This hawkish dissent was interpreted by the market as a warning to incoming Chair Kevin Warsh: don't think about cutting rates easily.

The interest rate futures market has now pushed the probability of a rate hike in December to 44%. At the beginning of the year, the market widely expected at least two rate cuts.

A 180-degree reversal in expectations, occurring in less than 5 months.

What Does 5% Mean?

Many people don't have a strong feeling about "U.S. Treasury yields." What does it actually have to do with your life, your assets, and the Bitcoin in your account?

Let's use an analogy.

The 30-year U.S. Treasury yield can be thought of as the "waterline" for global asset pricing. It is the closest thing to a "risk-free" long-term rate of return on the planet. The fair value of all other assets – stocks, real estate, gold, Bitcoin, private equity – is essentially derived by adding a risk premium on top of this waterline.

When the waterline rises, everything must be re-evaluated.

A concrete example: you hold a tech growth stock. The market was willing to give it a 30x P/E ratio, believing in its future cash flows over the next decade. But now the 30-year Treasury bond offers you a 5% "risk-free" return. With the same money, you could more than double your principal in 30 years by just holding bonds. Why take the risk of paying 30x earnings for an uncertain tech company?

Thus, valuations must come down.

Mortgages are similar. The U.S. 30-year fixed mortgage rate essentially follows the 10-year Treasury yield. If the 10-year yield breaks above 4.6%, new mortgage applicants could face rates above 7%. This is why sustained upward pressure on the 30-year yield above 5% could create strain that extends beyond the bond market, impacting real estate, small-cap stocks, high-valuation growth stocks, and any other sector reliant on persistently low-cost long-term capital.

As for gold and Bitcoin, their common feature is that they generate no cash flow.

In a zero-interest-rate era, this wasn't a problem because your alternative was a Treasury yielding 0.5%. But now the alternative is a Treasury yielding 5%, which completely changes the equation.

Over the past three weeks, Bitcoin's performance has perfectly illustrated the "macro alternative" dynamic.

In the week when the 10-year Treasury yield broke above 4.5% and the 30-year approached 5.1%, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw net outflows of approximately $700 million.

Bitcoin's price fell from above $82,000 back below $80,000. On May 19, the same day the 30-year yield hit 5.18%, Bitcoin came under pressure alongside altcoins and other risk assets.

The logic chain is simple:

Institutional investors face a very specific arithmetic problem. Putting $1 million into a 30-year Treasury yields a stable $50,000 annually for thirty years, with principal returned at maturity, and nearly zero risk. Putting the same money into Bitcoin is a bet that it can outperform that 5% compound return.

The insidious nature of compounding is that 5% over 30 years multiplies your money 4.3 times. So, Bitcoin must outperform a 4.3x return over 30 years just to "break even" on this opportunity cost. Sounds easy? But that's assuming you can withstand any 50%+ drawdowns along the way.

This is why the capital rotation logic – "every dollar in Bitcoin is a dollar not earning that 5% return" – will continue to pressure non-yielding assets.

What Truly Warrants Caution is Something Else

Let's return to the figure 5.18% itself.

Many analyses interpret this as "short-term tightening pressure." I disagree.

If you take a longer view, the biggest macro backdrop for global asset prices over the past forty years has been the secular decline in interest rates. The U.S. 10-year yield was 15% in 1981; it fell to 0.5% in 2020. For 40 years, the waterline was steadily dropping. All "value investing logic," all "60/40 portfolios," all "tech stock valuation models," and even the narrative of whether Bitcoin can be "digital gold," were built upon this long-term trend.

The question now is whether this 40-year downward trend may have already ended in 2020.

What we are witnessing could be the early stages of the waterline starting to rise in reverse.

"The market is beginning to price in that the Fed will have to work harder to suppress inflation," said Ed Al-Hussainy, a portfolio manager at Columbia Asset Management. He added that the sell-off reflects not only a troubling inflation path but also an accelerating economy.

If his assessment is correct, then 5.18% is not the end, but the starting point of a new range.

The deeper question concerns debt.

U.S. federal debt is approaching $37 trillion. Every 1 percentage point increase in interest rates means the Treasury must pay hundreds of billions of dollars more in interest annually. When interest expenses surpass defense budgets and Medicare spending, eventually eating into everything else, the market will force the government to either drastically cut spending or monetize the debt.

Historically, every major debt cycle has ended in one of these two ways.

U.S. Treasuries are called "ballast" because they serve as the underlying collateral for the global financial system. Banks' capital adequacy ratios, insurance companies' solvency, pension funds' duration matching, hedge funds' repo financing, central banks' foreign exchange reserves – all these chains ultimately rest on U.S. Treasuries.

When the ballast's price fluctuates violently, the whole ship starts to rock.

The trigger for Silicon Valley Bank's collapse in 2023 was the unrealized losses on its Treasury holdings. If long-term yields above 5% become the norm, who will be the next to surface with losses?

There is no standard answer to this question. But as an investor, you should at least ask yourself one more question when reviewing your asset allocation:

Are the valuation models for my assets still assuming a zero-interest-rate environment?

If so, please recalculate.

The waterline has already changed.