Двухнедельный обзор фондовых рынков №352. Игра от обороны

For years, U.S. debt was the market’s favorite background worry: always discussed, rarely priced. That is changing. Last Tuesday, the 30-year Treasury yield touched 5.337%, the highest level since April 2007, while the August long-bond auction cleared at 5.216%, the lowest auction price since 2001. The next day, the Treasury said it would “at least double” far-end buybacks from roughly $2bn to $4bn per operation between September 9 and November 4. The signal mattered. The size did not. In practice, the expanded program amounts to about $32bn per quarter. Treasury borrowing is running at roughly $39bn per week. Quarterly redemptions are smaller than a single week’s funding need in a market of roughly $32tn, so the impact is merely symbolic. Year to date, the 10-year nominal yield is up 51 bps, 10-year TIPS are up 42 bps, with inflation expectations up just 9 bps to 2.34%. In other words, only about 20% of the move reflects inflation, whereas the remaining 80% is attributed to debt-related risk premia—i.e., “debt is too high, so pay for the risk.”

Washington is trying to manage the problem, but the arithmetic is not getting easier. Revenues are just over 17% of GDP, slightly above the 25-year average of 16.7%, helped by tariffs. But spending pressure is still building. Healthcare and social outlays are running above their long-term average, and the CBO expects them to rise further by 2035. Interest expense is projected to climb from 3.2% of GDP in 2025 to 4.1% by 2035. Defense spending, meanwhile, sits below its historical average despite elevated military tensions with Iran. So the Treasury has to keep borrowing to maintain the “celebration of life.” The problem is that it is no longer borrowing alone. Big Tech is now competing for the same pool of capital. Hyperscalers placed $132bn of bonds in seven months, nearly four times the typical annual pace seen in the early 2020s. In February, Alphabet sold the first 100-year bond by a technology company in three decades, with demand exceeding supply tenfold. But the easy part may already be over: oversubscription on hyperscaler deals fell from nearly 5x in February to below 2x in July. Even the IMF has noted that the long-standing U.S. safe-asset premium has flipped, with Treasuries now yielding more than the hedged sovereign debt of other G10 countries.

This is where gold stops looking like a passive relic and starts looking like an answer. Its zero coupon, long treated as a flaw, has become part of the appeal. Gold has no issuer with $40tn of debt. It has no buyback program financed by shorter-dated issuance. It has no $2.1tn annual deficit to cover. In a market where the safest asset is starting to trade with an issuer-risk premium, an asset with no issuer begins to look less like insurance and more like portfolio infrastructure. For a three-year investor, the risk of excluding precious metals may now be greater than the risk of including them. Direct exposure through SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) or iShares Gold Trust (IAU) is straightforward. For operating leverage to a potential rebound in miners, VanEck Gold Miners (GDX) offers a higher-beta route. None of this means a U.S. default is imminent. If fiscal policy tightens and taxes rise, yields could normalize quickly. But a 5–10% gold allocation looks like a prudent hedge against the low-probability scenario that the bond market is now starting to signal. If current trends persist, gold could plausibly set new all-time highs within the next two to three years.