저자: EurodollarUniversity진행자 · 외국인
요약 보기
레이 달리오의 미국 부채 위기 경고를 소개하고 이를 반박하는 영상. 재무부 환매 확대는 채권 시장 통제가 아닌 내러티브 관리이며, 장기금리 상승은 제한적이고 텀프리미엄·스프레드는 낮고 안정적이라 '매수 파업(buyers' strike)' 증거는 없다고 주장. 미국의 실제 위기는 금리가 아닌 K자형 경제와 신용 사이클 둔화라고 봄. 중간에 금 보관 서비스 스폰서 광고 포함.
다듬은 글
Ray Dalio says the United States is approaching a debt crisis, or may already be in one. The billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates points to huge deficits, rising interest costs, shrinking Japanese investment in U.S. bonds and rising yields on long-term Treasury bonds. But one development may look particularly suspicious, at least to Dalio.
The Ministry of Finance is increasing the volume of public debt redemptions. Dalio believes the buyback announcement fits into a broader trend. The government knows that demand is becoming a problem, so, the argument goes, it is secretly trying to control the bond market before the situation gets out of hand.
That sounds plausible. The government owes 40 trillion. It spends about 2 trillion more than it actually collects, and that's every year. Interest costs are approaching a trillion a year, while trillions of dollars of existing debt must be constantly refinanced. But what you probably don't know is that there are ways to check Ray Dalio's warnings.
If the market were to start rejecting Treasury bonds, it wouldn't be hidden in a LinkedIn post or a Treasury press release . We would see this everywhere in the critical dimensions that markets communicate. So today we'll look at what a debt crisis would look like, but more importantly, we'll put it to the test.
What does the evidence actually show? Because America certainly has a debt problem, but a debt problem at the government level doesn't necessarily mean a bond market problem. So what does the evidence really say about the sovereign debt crisis? And we will talk about where the debt crisis is already manifesting itself in reality.
Dalio's argument begins with arithmetic. He estimates the federal government will take in about $5.5 trillion in revenue this year, spending about $7.5 trillion. This leaves a deficit of 2 trillion, with interest costs alone amounting to about 1 trillion, and about 10 trillion of national debt that may need to be refinanced.
And if this refinancing occurs at higher interest rates, debt service costs will rise even more, even if Congress doesn't add new programs. This is a mechanism in the “great debt cycle” that Dalio talks about. The government borrows more , interest absorbs a larger share of income, and investors eventually become reluctant to buy additional debt at existing yields.
At this point, the government has two unpleasant options. It could accept much higher interest rates, which would further worsen its financial situation, or the central bank could turn on the printing press and start printing money to absorb the debt, risking currency depreciation and hyperinflation.
Putting aside this problematic assumption , this is what central banks, at least modern central banks, can and will do. Dalio says the government's financial health is at a tipping point. If this is not addressed, he warns, the debt could become unmanageable without, quote , "major trauma." That's why he advises reducing the share of bonds and diversifying into financially stronger countries, gold, and a little bit of bitcoin, if you can find such countries.
And what happens then? The Treasury is announcing larger debt buybacks, and it seems Dalio is right, because to him it doesn't look like a coincidence, but like confirmation. Before we declare a buyers' strike, we need to clearly define it, because, let's face it, interest rates can rise for many reasons.
Just looking at 30- year bonds and saying, "Well, they're at a 19- year high." So, this must mean a debt crisis." This is the wrong approach . Yields are increasing for many different reasons. Investors can expect the Fed to intervene in short-term rates for longer. Economic growth may look stronger.
Yes, stronger, higher stakes can be a good thing. Inflation expectations could also rise, which would n't be a good thing. Dealers may temporarily need more balance sheet capital. A wave of new releases may temporarily require slightly higher prices to close. None of this automatically means investors are rejecting Treasury debt.
A true rejection would be broader and noticeably more persistent. Long-term yields would rise aggressively relative to short-term rates as investors would demand significantly more compensation for holding government debt for years or, especially, decades in the case of 30-year bonds. The curve itself would undergo a sustained " bearish" twist, rather than simply oscillating around levels reached a few years ago.
Inflation compensation would become, as economists say, unfixed. Liquidity could deteriorate across the market. Financing Treasury bonds in a repo system would become a little more complicated. And investors would demand a constant premium for fiscal risk. You might see some weak auctions or daily jumps in yields, but that wouldn't be enough.
Markets are noisy. Rejection would have to manifest itself through numerous independent indicators and last for an extended period. The evidence currently does not show this. Yes, long-term yields have risen, but the Treasury curve remains historically compressed. Auctions continue to take place, despite all the talk about this or that release.
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The buyback announcement seems to change everything, especially given what the term means in the financial context most people are familiar with. They are thinking about buying back shares, so in a sense this is a major Treasury operation that doesn't just interfere with the yield curve, it changes everything completely.
And they wouldn't do it if there wasn't a danger of the situation getting out of control. When a corporation buys back its own shares, it removes them from the market. When a financially healthy company pays down debt, it reduces its total liabilities. So if the U.S. Treasury is buying up Treasury securities, it might sound like the government is using its fiscal power to support bond prices and hold down yields.
And time, let's be honest, only adds to the suspicion, but for completely different reasons. Long-term bond yields are indeed at multi-year highs, especially 30-year yields. Japan has reportedly slightly reduced its holdings of US bonds. The deficits certainly remain huge. Suddenly, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant appears and announces that the government will increase the redemption of outstanding debt.
The current limit for the repurchase of coupon securities is increased from 2 billion to 4 billion. For critics, this is “ light” quantitative easing or even the beginning of yield curve control. So the question arises: why would they want to control the yield curve if it is not becoming an increasing problem?
Even if Dalio is wrong, the interpretation suggests itself. Organic buyers are disappearing, so the government becomes the buyer. Officials know the Treasury bond market is cracking and want the authority to intervene before others notice. But this interpretation requires ignoring two critical details.
The buyback program, as I recently noted, is not new. The Treasury has to borrow money, which it uses to buy bonds. This is the other side of the coin. Any rumors to the contrary only betray the government's true game with such interventions. To rephrase a discussion topic as if there were official options.
It's about controlling narratives. Ultimately, the Ministry of Finance will redeem the debts from May 29, 2024. Most people didn't even know about it. So, in 2024, the buybacks started, in 2026 they will double them, because, as before, people were talking about rising interest rates. They want to give the conversation a different direction.
So Besson only announced an increase in the coupon limit from 2 to 4 billion. This is a change, but not a transition from a free market one day to government-controlled profitability the next. If $2 billion wasn't previously a yield curve control , then doubling the limit doesn't suddenly give the Treasury Department power over a market with tens of trillions of dollars.
Unless the government has a budget surplus, which is clearly not the case. Funds for the redemption of old bonds must ultimately come from taxes or the issuance of other government obligations. And it doesn't matter. Rumors that surfaced this morning: if the funds are coming out of the TGA account, they will eventually have to be borrowed.
The Ministry of Finance is actually selling some bonds and buying others. This may change the structure of the debt, but does not reduce the government's overall debt . It doesn't monetize the deficit, create new money, or provide a guaranteed buyer at every auction. The whole goal is to control the narrative, because the government knows: 30-year bonds, even slightly more expensive than a few years ago, will make the media scream about a 19-year high.
Buyouts are the Ministry of Finance's response to this noise by creating even more noise in the system. Everything revolves around the narrative, including Mr. Dalio. But what does the evidence actually show? If investors were truly abandoning the government bond market en masse, there would be very clear and unambiguous signs in several key places.
That's where we'll look. To begin with, long-term yields would increase significantly relative to short-term yields, meaning long-term rates would rise much higher and faster. Relative movement weighs more than isolated 30-year returns. The 30- year yield may be the highest since 2007, but it first rose above 5% in October 2023.
Almost 3 years have passed, and it is only slightly higher than that previous peak . Technically this is a new high, but it is not the 3-year bond market crash that the same people predicted 3 years ago. A true large-scale buyer strike would have to lead to a sustained and accelerated revaluation. Accelerated revaluation.
We got a revaluation that is slowing down. Long-term bonds have been moving in a volatile range for years, mostly staying within it . At the same time, short-term yields were, of course, affected by the increased Federal Reserve interest rate. The result was an extremely, historically flat, compressed curve compared to previous periods.
A flat curve is not what you expect from a market that is adding a huge new risk premium to long-term government debt. This more often means that investors are questioning the ability of today's short-term rates to withstand weak growth, tighter credit and lower inflation. When economic conditions ease, the short-term segment may rise in anticipation of future rate cuts, while the long-term segment moves more slowly .
This creates a "bullish" steepness, a normalization driven by falling short-term rates, not by a rejection of government bonds. If the supply of debt outweighed everything else, the long-term segment would have to pull away decisively. This is not there. Moreover, there is no indication that this will happen anytime soon.
And I can't emphasize this point enough. Until that happens, Dalio and everyone else are telling you a story about what they think might happen. A story that the prospective market simply isn't buying, or, in this case, literally isn't selling. The market is still pricing in future economic weakness and lower rates, not an uncontrolled fiscal risk spiral, and it's not even close to that .
Now this part is going to be a little technical, but it doesn't matter since it all comes down to the same thing anyway . We will talk about the so- called term bonuses. When all other evidence, including, especially, flat yield curves, runs out, economists turn to term premiums. And term premiums are nothing more than a fabrication of economists to explain interest rates that are more favorable to central banks and their policies than to the econometric models they have created.
But even if we take term bonuses for granted, which we shouldn't do because they are completely fictional, even if we accept them, they don't show what everyone is talking about. In fact, they show the opposite. According to economists, the yield on a 10-year or 30-year Treasury bond can theoretically be divided into two components.
At least, that's what they claim. The first is the expected average trajectory of short-term interest rates over the life of the bond. The second is the so-called term premium, that is, the additional remuneration that investors supposedly demand for accepting inflationary, time, liquidity, and other types of uncertainties and risks.
If the budget deficit and the supply of Treasury bonds make long-term securities riskier, then the economic term premium should increase. I mean, it sounds completely logical. This would allow the yield curve to signal fiscal tightening even if inflation expectations or projections for the federal funds rate do not change significantly.
This is an attractive argument because it gives the debt narrative a concrete number. But there is a nuance. As I have already noted, the term premium cannot be observed directly. You can check the 10- year yield, the price of a Treasury futures, an interest rate swap, or TIPS securities, but the term premium comes out of the model.
This is the residual that the model produces after economists estimate where they think short-term rates will go. And different assumptions can yield different estimates. If the model overestimates future short-term rates, it will mechanically show a lower, or even negative, term premium, as we saw during the 2010s.
This means that this indicator should be interpreted with caution. However, as I said, even if we take these models at face value, they still do not confirm the current “ buyers’ strike” that Dalio talks about. Let's set aside for a moment the reliability of term premiums themselves and their figures.
There is no indication that term premiums are anything other than historically low. This is the opposite of what should happen in the event of a withdrawal from Treasury bonds. By the way, if you really want to know what term premiums are and where they come from, I just did an in-depth analysis of this issue for Eurodollar University subscribers.
So, along with everything else on this topic, more information is available. Given the description of the term premium, it would make sense that it would increase sharply, at least theoretically, if the debt crisis and “ buyers’ strike” that Ray Dalio talks about occurred. There should be a sustained increase in the price of long-term risk.
It really is that simple. Investors will demand ever- increasing rewards for holding Treasury bonds as deficits and refinancing needs , and especially the interest costs that Dalio points to, become ever-increasing. Therefore, the estimated term premium should increase sharply and steadily. Instead, according to estimates of the 10- year term premium calculated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, they have remained relatively low and generally stable in recent years.
Yes, they didn't change during a period when deficits became more and more terrible. Again , there is no sign, absolutely no sign, of a structural breakout that would trigger a strike by Treasury bond buyers. And then there are yield spreads , which give an even clearer signal. When the Fed keeps short-term rates elevated and long-term yields refuse to rise proportionately , the market rejects the official path for short rates, not the Treasury securities themselves.
This is the flattening of the yield curve. And all of this, by the way, is based on information that we get from the entire system, whether it's from private lending or from the stagnation of the consumer sector, and how they interact. I mean, think about a private loan. Recently, we have seen the number of non-performing loans increasing in some business development companies.
Defaults and restructurings are emerging in highly leveraged companies that were financed during the boom of 2020 and 2021 . And these trends, along with stagnant consumption and the labor market, do not point to consistently higher growth or inflation. They point to a credit cycle that is heading towards its decline.
And when private credit becomes less reliable, the demand for safe government collateral usually becomes more valuable, not less valuable. This is not to say that Dalio's fiscal concerns should be ignored, because they shouldn't be ignored . We all know that the government is in serious trouble , and the situation is getting worse.
We ask whether this problem is developing into an interest rate crisis in the debt market. Well , the crisis is already showing, and not in interest rates, at least not in the way people assume. The government cannot indefinitely increase debt faster than revenues without consequences, but those consequences are already spilling over into the real economy, not into the 30-year U.S.
Treasury yield, which is rising gently by a few dozen basis points at historically low spreads and term premiums. The debt crisis is in macroeconomics, not in market interest rates, I repeat, not in market interest rates in the sense you are used to. You are convinced by Dalio and many others that government debt will lead to a market crash, hence higher rates and, many believe, the destruction of the dollar.
But the real debt crisis is the K-shaped economy, which is what actually caused the budget deficits starting in 2008. The more the government does, the worse, you know, the economy has to be . This is true for the US, China, it's a big problem, all over Europe, and certainly in Japan. Everyone sees that uncontrolled borrowing is an oversupply of debt, which should therefore lead to buyer rejection.
But the truth is that buyers only want to buy more when economic conditions are this bad, and judging by market expectations, these bad conditions are not going to change anytime soon. The demand for security remains high, which allows governments to do what they do. This part is reflected in the percentage rate.
The demand for safety is the very reason why the 30-year yield is only a quarter of a point higher than it was 3 years ago, when we heard all these same arguments. The terrible K-shaped economy is the reason why yield spreads, or term premiums if you're an economist, are historically very low and not rising .
The real debt crisis in the economy, as I said, is the interest rate, and the real debt crisis is when the market rejects Dalio's narrative, no matter how correct his initial thesis is. The national debt is obscene, but that doesn't mean what most of these people think. To prove market rebellion, we need market evidence.
And right now, the evidence continues to suggest the opposite, and significantly so. It's everywhere. So, here's the score on the scoreboard and what all the evidence actually shows. Long-term yields are higher compared to the post-2008 era, but they have not broken away decisively from the levels reached in 2023, or even 2022.
Let's face the truth. Comparing with 2007 is also not such a high bar. 5 and 1/4% is not such a huge rate, even if it seems that way to most people because they don't know history. Yield spreads remain too tight to support the idea that markets are adding an explosive fiscal risk premium to long-term bonds.
Term premiums, whatever you think of them, remain low and generally stable, rather than demonstrating a sustained overpricing of the debt crisis. Inflation expectations, we talked about them: TIPS, you can use inflation swaps. They do not signal an uncontrolled monetary reaction. Treasury bond auctions, yes, sometimes they produce what people call weak results, as they always have, but there is no consistent pattern of failed issues or disappearing demand.
Treasury bonds continue to function as important collateral in repo transactions, derivatives, banking, and especially in the overall global Eurodollar financing network. And the Treasury repurchase operation is primarily a symbolic narrative management measure , no different from the equally senseless and failed intervention in the yen.
But most importantly: the market continues to differentiate between the US government's fiscal outlook and the utility of Treasury securities. Investors may not like Washington's deficits, but they still need Treasury bonds for liquidity, collateral, regulatory requirements, reserve management, and protection against private lending and ongoing macroeconomic risks.
This is not blind faith in government, this is how the global monetary system is built, whether we like it or not. Ray Dalio may ultimately be right that America's debt trajectory is dangerous, but it's a prediction based on pure speculation that ignores, well, a whole lot . The claim that the market is already starting to reject Treasury debt is testable, and the current evidence simply does not support it.
The Treasury repurchase program is not some secret quantitative easing that was needed, otherwise yield curve control would have been our last resort before collapse. It has been in existence since 2024 and replaces new debts with old ones without reducing the total amount, and there is no printing of money.
The multi-year high in 30- year bond yields is not sufficient evidence, as this move was surprisingly small compared to the panic surrounding it. And neither yield spreads nor term premium estimates show the sustained repricing that one would expect from a true revolt against Treasuries. If any of this changes, we'll know.
Long-term profitability will increase compared to short-term. Term premiums, inflation compensation, and yield spreads will grow clearly and persistently. The bond market is not saying that the US doesn't have fiscal problems. He says this fiscal problem is not a Treasury debt crisis , and it won't become one anytime soon .
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