The US Treasury tried to calm the bond market this week. It did the opposite. Yields kept climbing anyway, and by Thursday the move had spilled into Bitcoin’s chart too.
“You Can’t Make This Up”
That was the actual headline from The Kobeissi Letter on September 9, and it is hard to argue with. The US Treasury announced it was tripling long-term bond buybacks to $6 billion, going from doubling, to “at least doubling,” to tripling in the space of a few weeks. Normally that kind of intervention pushes yields down. Instead, the 10-year note yield rallied on the news, crossing above 4.85% for the first time since November 2023.
Confirmed at the Source
This isn’t secondhand. Treasury’s own buyback filing system shows a “Liquidity Support” operation dated September 10, 2026, covering nominal coupon securities maturing between 2037 and 2046. The maximum par amount to be redeemed is listed at exactly $6,000,000,000.
That is the government’s own record of the operation, not a summary of it. Long-dated debt, six billion dollars, filed the same week the yield spike started.
The Bond Market Isn’t Cooperating
By September 10, Kobeissi’s follow-up put the 10-year yield above 4.90%, up 95 basis points since the Iran war began and another 10 basis points higher since the buyback announcement itself. Their read: the housing market is effectively frozen, and US homebuyers are walking away from deals at the highest rate since 2023.
Checking the number independently at the close of trading confirms it has kept climbing since that post. The 10-year yield printed 4.963%, a fresh 52-week high.
The Treasury’s own buyback tool is meant to support liquidity and ease pressure on longer-dated debt. Right now the bond market is simply overpowering it.
Bitcoin’s Chart Shows What Rising Yields Do to Risk Assets
Bitcoin peaked near $82,000 in the first days of September. It has been grinding lower since, and sits around $77,200 as of this writing, down roughly 1.4% on the day.
Rising real yields make holding a non-yielding asset like Bitcoin more expensive in relative terms, and that pressure has been visible across futures markets. CoinGlass’s own data currently shows Bitcoin futures open interest at $53.48 billion with market-wide 24-hour liquidations running above $500 million, a mix of long and short positions getting caught out as the price whipsaws around the $77,000 level.
The Longer-Term Thesis Nobody’s Pricing In Yet
None of this changes the bigger structural story building underneath crypto: tokenized real-world assets. DefiLlama’s own tracker shows Robinhood Chain, the Ethereum-based network behind Robinhood’s push into tokenized stocks, now holding $894 million in TVL with $1.78 billion in DEX volume over the last 24 hours alone, growth that has continued steadily since the chain went live in July.
Robinhood Chain doesn’t have its own token. But it runs on Ethereum, and the thesis is straightforward: if tokenized equities keep pulling in this kind of liquidity, the infrastructure layer underneath it, and the assets people already hold to gain exposure to that infrastructure, stand to benefit first.
For now, though, the immediate story is simpler and less comfortable. The bond market is fighting the Treasury, yields keep printing new highs, and Bitcoin is feeling it in real time.
