TREASURY SOLD $39 BILLION OF 10-YEARS AT 4.834% — AND DEALERS TOOK 4%

4.834%. That is where Treasury sold $39 billion of 10-year notes Wednesday afternoon, 15 basis points above last month’s 4.683%. Bids covered the sale 2.71 times. Indirect bidders, mostly foreign central banks and funds, took $30.8 billion of it, 79%. Primary dealers, the banks obliged to buy whatever is left, were left with $1.68 billion, 4.3%.

Read those two numbers together. The world is not refusing American debt. It is buying all of it, at a price 15 basis points higher than in August. The buyers are there. The rate is what changed.

Same day, same building: Treasury said it will spend $6 billion Thursday buying back its own older bonds to hold up the long end. Six billion in, thirty-nine billion out, in one afternoon. The market took both and put the 10-year at 4.83% anyway, the highest since 2023.

A bond is a promise to pay dollars later. The auction says lenders now want 4.83% a year to hold that promise for ten years, and the buyback says the borrower is nervous about its older promises. Bitcoin makes no promise to pay anything later. That is the point of it.

At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $78,142 at 5:18 PM ET on Crypto.com.