The Era of Cheap Money Is Over
Cory Klippsten, founder of Swan, sat down with Kitco’s Jeremy Szafron & put a name on the tape that has taken government bond yields back to levels last seen in 2002. He calls them the four horsemen of the bond apocalypse. The point of the interview is not a trading setup. It is the price of capital, and why that price is the whole argument for Bitcoin.
Yields are not rising in one country because growth is hot. They are rising together. The United States, Japan, Britain, and France are all paying coupons that would have been called crisis levels a few years ago. Klippsten’s line on the writeup is blunt.
“The era of cheap money is over.”
The horsemen, as he walks them, are the forces that used to hold that price down and no longer do.
One is the energy shock, with inflation still in the system after oil and diesel stopped behaving like a closed chapter.
Another is debt. On camera he marks it as number three. The United States has to roll a stock of borrowing that was built for a world of near zero rates.
A third is Japan. For decades Japan exported cheap capital, the yen carry that stuffed Treasuries and suppressed yields everywhere. That export is no longer free. When the anchor that lent the world its low rate starts paying up at home, everyone else’s curve has to reprice.
The fourth is the global bid strike that follows.
Foreign holders have their own holes. They are not lining up to fund someone else’s deficit at yesterday’s coupon. Put the four together and the 10 year does not need a hot payroll print to revisit 2002. It needs the old suppressors to fail at the same time.
Klippsten does not treat this as a reason to buy the long bond. A yield that is the highest in a generation can still be a losing real return if the issuer’s only endgame is to print. That is the Bitcoin chapter.
“Bitcoin gives us an alternative.”
His case is that the price of capital is the story, and hard money outside the issuer is the point of owning it. Stocks, housing, and private credit were built on the coupon that just died. When that coupon goes back to 2002 and the debt stock does not, the adjustment is not a dip. It is a regime.
The horsemen are not a metaphor he reached for. They are the energy shock, the debt, the end of Japan’s cheap export, and a world that will no longer fund it. The yield is just the receipt.
