THE TREASURY SOLD $549 BILLION IN FOUR DAYS AND 97.6% OF IT COMES DUE INSIDE A YEAR — JAPAN’S THIRTY-YEAR NOW PAYS ABOUT WHAT A SIX-MONTH BILL PAYS — AND TOKYO VOTES ON RATES TONIGHT

The Treasury sold $549.0 billion of paper in four days this week. $536.0 billion of that, 97.6% of the total, comes due inside a year. The only long bond was $13.0 billion of August 2046s, and to move them the government cut the price to 96.42 cents to pay 5.420%.

Read that as a choice. Twenty years costs 1.60 points more than four weeks, so the government went short. Short paper is cheaper and it has to be sold again. A twenty-year bond asks a buyer once. A four-week bill asks thirteen times a year.

Now look at who has been buying. Japan holds $1,185.5 billion of Treasuries, more than any other country, and it added $124.0 billion in the year to December 2025. That bid was built on Japanese rates being nothing.

They are not nothing now. Japan’s ten-year hit 2.93% in August, the highest since September 1996. MUFG put the thirty-year’s range for this week at 3.95% to 4.15%. The US six-month bill cleared at 4.060% on Monday. A Japanese buyer can get close to the same yield at home, in his own money, with no currency to lose.

The Bank of Japan votes Friday afternoon in Tokyo, 2:30 AM ET. MUFG reads the market at better than 90% odds of a hike to around 1.25%.

Bitcoin never has to be rolled over. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $76,507.