TLT · iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (proxy: long Treasuries) $81.19 -0.59 (-0.72%) 2026-SEP-18 12:49 EST

When lots of investors sell long-dated government bonds, bond prices fall and the interest rate (yield) the government must pay on new borrowing rises. The Treasury tried to support prices by buying some bonds back, but $6 billion is tiny next to a $32 trillion market — and it pays for those buybacks by borrowing short-term at higher rates, so it doesn't even save money.

Brown's point is that long yields are really the market's bet on future growth and inflation. With oil high, tariffs and a war pushing inflation up, and a Fed chair who won't print money to buy long bonds outside a crisis, he expects yields to keep climbing — which means long-bond prices (and funds like TLT) keep falling — until Washington pulls an emergency lever that forces money into Treasuries.

When interest rates rise, the price of existing long-term bonds falls. McClellan expects long-term rates to keep rising: gold's big run 20 months ago maps onto a steep climb in the 30-year yield starting late this year, and he finds a 30-year above 6% reasonable. That hurts long bonds and anyone taking out a mortgage.

Counterintuitively, he also notes that every round of Fed bond-buying ("quantitative easing") has coincided with falling bond prices. Only a switch to the Fed shrinking its holdings would soften his view. (New Harbor, the host's advisory firm, disagrees and is tactically bullish on bonds — that is their view, not his.)

TLT holds long-dated US government bonds. When interest rates fall, these bonds rise in price, and vice versa. For five years Deluard owned none: he expected inflation and rising rates, and he was right, so he kept that money in cash, gold and commodities.

With 10-year yields near 5%, he now sees fair value. At roughly 2% real growth plus 3% inflation, 5% is "not generous," but it beats stocks. Bonds should also cushion the stock-market fall he expects this winter. He is adding a little, cautiously, "not out of bullishness."

When interest rates on long government bonds rise, the price of existing bonds falls — that is why long-Treasury funds like TLT have lost about half their value in five years. Hunt reads the charts of the 10-year and 30-year yields as "breakouts" pointing higher still: about 5.3% for the 10-year and 6.3% for the 30-year.

His reasoning is that the foreign buyers who used to soak up US debt — oil exporters, Japanese investors borrowing cheaply at home, and hedge funds in the Cayman Islands — are pulling back, while the US has far more debt than in past high-rate eras. So even moderately higher rates could "break" things like housing, tech valuations and banks.

Gundlach has a simple buy rule for long government bonds: he wants a yield 2 points above inflation. With inflation near 4%, that means waiting for about 6%. Until then he stays in bonds of seven years or less, expecting long yields to keep rising unless the government steps in (as with "Operation Twist"). Oddly, his fair-value model says the 10-year is slightly too high today — but not by enough to override the inflation math.

Many people say a 5⅓% 30-year Treasury is a bargain. Gundlach's rule is to demand 3 percentage points above inflation; with inflation around 3½% and heading toward 4, he'd buy aggressively only near 6½%. The catch: the government's interest bill is exploding, so he expects the Treasury and Fed to eventually step in and cap long rates (buying bonds, "yield curve control") before they ever get that high — when that happens long bonds will rally, but for now the trend is still toward higher yields.

TLT is a fund that holds long-dated US government bonds (20 years and more). When interest rates rise, existing bonds that pay lower rates become worth less, so TLT's price falls; long bonds are the most sensitive to that. Hay uses a 10-year TLT chart to show prices breaking down to new lows, and a 30-year Treasury yield chart showing yields breaking out above their 2023 peak to about 5.33%.

His point is that this is not just an American problem: government bond yields are rising almost everywhere except China, and France looks closest to a real debt crisis — the government spends 57% of the economy, its interest bill is growing 25% a year while the economy grows about 3%, which is the classic "debt trap" where borrowing costs outrun the income that has to pay them. Rising long-term rates make stocks less attractive and borrowing more expensive, which is one of the four reasons he gives for raising cash now.

When you buy a government bond you lock in its interest rate; if rates later fall, your bond becomes worth more, and the longer the bond, the bigger the gain. Rosenberg thinks a 5% yield on the 10-year is a gift: the last time it got there, in October 2023, rates fell a full percentage point within three months.

His reasons: the inflation scare is mostly oil, and wages are slowing, so it should fade; after the November 3 midterms Congress likely deadlocks and stops pumping out stimulus; and on November 4 the Treasury decides what mix of short and long debt to sell — selling fewer long bonds would push their yields down, as it did in 2023. Many speculators are betting against bonds, so a small rally could force them to buy back and speed the move. The risk he admits: if the Fed keeps hiking four or five times, this leg loses.

TLT holds long-dated US government bonds, whose prices fall when long-term interest rates rise. Both guests expect those rates to rise substantially. Dale's five models put fair value for the 10-year yield at 5.87%, well above today's ~4.7%.

Gromen's point is that the Fed can't stop it either way. Raising short-term rates hands more interest income to wealthy retirees who spend it, which widens the deficit and pushes long-term rates up. Cutting rates while the economy is growing fast invites inflation, which also pushes them up. And a natural buyer has gone missing: life insurers, who hold large amounts of hard-to-value private loans and can't sell them to buy Treasuries without revealing losses. Remove a big buyer and yields can jump in steps rather than drift — "48, 52, 58, 62."

When interest rates rise, existing long bonds lose value. The 30-year Treasury's yield jumped from 0.27% in 2020 to 5.24%, and holders are still down more than half. Normally such a big move gets partly reversed — this one hasn't, which Gundlach reads as a sign rates keep climbing. His fair-value model and the risk that a timid Fed lets inflation run (pushing long yields up) point the same way: stay away from long government bonds.

TLT is a fund that holds long-dated US government bonds (20+ years to maturity). When interest rates fall, those bonds rise in price a lot; when rates rise, they fall. Right now long Treasuries yield around 5%, the most in years.

McGlone calls owning them "a put on the S&P 500 with positive carry, no time decay." A put option is insurance that pays off if stocks fall — but you pay for it, and it loses value every day it isn't used ("time decay"). Long bonds do a similar job, because when the stock market breaks the Fed usually cuts rates and bond prices jump — yet instead of costing you money while you wait, they pay you ~5% a year ("positive carry"). With stocks, gold and copper all looking stretched to him, he thinks that is the better place to wait.

TLT is a fund that holds long-dated US government bonds, so it rises when long-term interest rates fall and drops when they rise. With the 30-year yield near 5.3% and nearly every well-known investor saying bonds are a disaster, Le Shrub has placed a small bet the other way.

The bet is built with options, so the most he can lose is what he paid — about 0.3% of his portfolio — while a big bond rally could return around ten times that. His reasoning is that the Treasury Secretary has already “managed” oil prices and the yen through a crisis, and may do the same to long-term rates with tools like buying back old bonds, issuing fewer long ones and letting banks hold more. He puts the odds of real success at only 20-30%, but the payoff is lopsided, and when everyone from TV hosts to magazine covers hates a trade, he is reluctant to be on the same side. He is clear it is a trade, not a belief in bonds: deficits and war-driven inflation mean he would not own them long term.

The yield on a bond should roughly track how fast the economy is growing in money terms (real growth plus inflation, "nominal GDP"). Howell says that nominal growth is the fastest since the mid-1980s, yet long-term yields are about one percentage point lower than that would justify. So he expects yields to keep climbing — and when yields rise, the prices of long-dated bonds (what TLT holds) fall. Governments will try to slow that, but he sees the pressure as upward.

TLT is a fund holding US government bonds that mature 20 or more years from now. Because they pay a fixed amount for so long, their price swings hard when interest rates move: rates up, price down — and TLT has lost money for four straight years, the worst stretch for long bonds in at least 40.

That is exactly why McDonald is turning positive. Everyone already knows the reasons to hate long bonds — huge government borrowing, big tech issuing hundreds of billions of new debt, socialist politics in the US, France and the UK. When a bear case is that famous, he reckons it is "80 to 90% priced in." Positioning data (what futures traders actually hold, and every bull/bear survey) shows record pessimism, and in 2017–21 it was the exact opposite: TLT was one of the most popular funds in the market and everyone lost money owning it.

His trigger is counterintuitive: a burst of inflation from energy and food would push yields up one more time — and that final squeeze on an already-broke bottom 70% of consumers is what tips the economy into recession. In a recession, rates fall and these bonds rally hard. So the last leg down is the buying opportunity, not the reason to stay away. Note he says "start at least thinking about buying" — this is the turn in his view, not a table-pounding call.

TLT holds long-dated US government bonds, so its price falls when long-term interest rates rise. Both guests are negative on it, and the interesting part is that they get there by different routes that don't depend on each other.

Alden's route is a headcount of who is left to buy. Foreigners are still buying in dollar terms but not nearly fast enough to keep up with how much is being issued. The Fed is run by a self-described balance-sheet hawk who does not want to expand it. Banks can buy more only if regulators relax the leverage rules again. Insurance companies and pension funds — the traditional patient buyers of long bonds — cannot simply borrow to buy; they have to sell something first, and what they own is illiquid private credit. Her verdict is deliberately measured: no crisis signal is flashing yet, but "I do think that they're getting squeezed," and what we have had so far is "a pretty orderly degradation of the global bond market."

Gromen's route is arithmetic. Interest plus entitlements plus veterans' benefits already consume 105% of federal tax receipts and are growing at roughly twice the rate of receipts, so higher long-term rates compound the problem rather than solving it. And because every category of patient buyer is blocked at the same moment, he expects the failure to be sudden rather than gradual — "a nonlinearity at the long end." In his shutdown scenario, government bonds are the asset that pays for the reset: "Treasuries will have lost immense amounts of value relative to those assets."

TLT holds long-dated US government bonds — IOUs from the Treasury that mature 20 to 30 years out. Long bonds move opposite to interest rates: when long-term yields fall, the price of TLT rises, and because those bonds have so many years left, the price move is big. That leverage to falling yields is the whole trade.

Almost nobody wants them — "most people think bonds are dead" after years of losses — which is exactly why Dowd calls the long end "one of the greatest asymmetric trades in the investment universe right now." His logic is a loop: governments and AI borrowers are competing for the same pool of savings, so yields have to rise to attract money; high yields then strangle the economy; a slowing economy means the Fed cuts and long yields fall.

He is candid that the trade "has gone against us recently" — yields kept rising. But the payoff shape is lopsided: modest further pain if he's early, a large gain if the recession and the AI bust arrive. And when the switch happens, "it'll happen fast," because everyone repositions at once.

TLT holds long-dated US government bonds. Gromen is bearish, but it is important to be precise about how: he is bearish in real terms and explicitly not calling for a crash in price.

He puts the odds of the US failing to pay a bondholder in dollars at zero — that will never happen. Nor does he expect the 10-year to run to 8%, because the government cannot afford it and will intervene, exactly as it did the day this was recorded. So the bonds mostly sit there. The loss comes from what those dollars buy. Measured in gold, long US Treasuries are already down 90–95% since 2014, when central banks collectively stopped adding to their holdings, and "I think it's got another 90 to 95% to go against gold, and I don't think it's going to move that much" — meaning almost all of the remaining damage comes from gold rising rather than bonds falling.

One technical aside for anyone thinking about selling volatility on it: he expects Treasuries to stay choppy, because hedge funds now own 8.5% of the Treasury market — more than Japan, China or Saudi Arabia — largely through a heavily borrowed arbitrage trade that gets unwound violently when markets move.

TLT holds long-dated US government bonds. Bond prices move opposite to yields, and long bonds move the most — so when the Treasury announced it would double the size of its buybacks of long-dated debt, TLT was the direct beneficiary, and options traders bought twice as many calls as puts.

The bigger idea underneath is what the whole desk took from today: by acting the day after the 30-year yield went above 5.30%, the Treasury effectively revealed the level at which it becomes uncomfortable — and signalled it will keep intervening into the November midterms. Traders now believe there is a ceiling on long-term yields, which is the same thing as believing there is a floor under long bond prices. Michael Santoli's caveat is worth keeping: nobody knows the half-life of a measure like this.

TLT holds long-dated US government bonds, so it rises when long-term interest rates fall. Buying it is a straightforward bet that yields have peaked — and he bought last week, "for the first time in years," which is his way of signalling how unusual the call is for him.

He isn't forecasting a collapse in rates, just flat-to-slightly-lower, with one named risk that would break it: a major escalation of the war, not a minor one.

TLT holds long-dated US government bonds, and bond prices move opposite to yields — so a forecast of rising long-term yields is a forecast of TLT falling. Newton expects exactly that: "we're going to have a treasury decline where yields creep back to the highs and actually get close to 5%" on the 10-year.

Notably, he does not think inflation is coming back — "it's not necessarily that inflation's going to roar back," and breakevens (the market's own inflation forecast, read from the gap between regular and inflation-protected bonds) "have been plummeting." The pressure comes from three other places: oil heading to $100 lifting the term premium (the extra yield investors demand for lending far into the future), growth running better than expected, and Fed Chair Warsh dropping forward guidance, which anchors short rates while leaving the long end to drift up on its own.

The knock-on effects run through the whole interview: higher long yields are the headwind on gold, on Bitcoin (via tighter liquidity) and on stock valuations, and they are the fuel for his financials overweight. Mortgage rates at 6.7%, "more than double" what many homeowners locked in, are the real-economy cost — which he thinks eventually chokes housing supply.

TLT holds long-dated US government bonds, so it falls when long-term interest rates rise — and it falls far more, in real terms, when inflation runs hot. This is the clearest negative in the interview, and Gromen states it as near-certainty rather than forecast.

The chain is simple. Rebuilding factories, power and mines at speed cannot be done without a great deal of borrowed and printed money, which is inflationary. Inflation is precisely what destroys a fixed 4% coupon stretching out thirty years. And the government cannot allow long rates to rise enough to compensate holders, because the interest bill already eats all the tax revenue — so it will cap yields instead and let the currency take the damage.

His scoreboard uses gold as the yardstick because gold can't be printed: measured that way, long US bonds are already down 90% over ten years, "and they're going to have to go down at least 99% more against gold over the next 10 to 20 years if we continue to try to reshore and build." His phrasing for how the transition gets funded is blunt: "you just got to load up the suckers holding the stuff and then do it."

TLT holds long-dated US government bonds, so it rises when long-term interest rates fall. He had started a small position the week before with a plan to add as yields approached 5%. The weak jobs report did the work: yields fell, and he says the add caught "the peak in the 10-year almost perfectly."

TLT holds long-dated US government bonds; it falls when long-term interest rates rise and gains when they fall. It has just hit its lowest price since the 2008 financial crisis, because yields have been climbing all year.

Singh has started a small "tracking" position — a toe in the water so the trade stays on his radar — and says he would buy far more aggressively if the 10-year yield approaches 5%. His logic: if the Iran war ends and oil falls below $70, the 10-year is close to its peak, and long bonds bought at these levels would be the biggest beneficiary.

TLT holds long-dated US government bonds, so its price falls when long-term yields rise. Gromen names it as the yardstick — a chart of the S&P divided by TLT is "exponential," money leaving bonds for stocks — but his own view of the asset is plainly negative: "don't own long-term bonds and own equities instead."

The reason is a mechanical one most investors have backwards. Since 2022 roughly 37–40% of new US notes and bonds have been bought by leveraged hedge funds running the "basis trade" (buy the bond, short the futures contract, do it with borrowed money). When stock-market volatility spikes, those funds' risk managers force them flat across the whole book — so the biggest buyer of Treasuries turns seller exactly when everything else is falling. Long yields therefore dip only briefly in a crisis (days to a few weeks) and then rise faster, which has now happened five times since 2020.

Longer term he sees no escape either: governments are borrowing for defense spending, inflating their debts away, and if the world's backstop asset shifts from Treasuries to gold, "the real value of bonds gets crushed." As he puts it, "bonds are going to get crushed by either devaluation or war… that's in the cake." The only relief comes when policymakers inject dollar liquidity to rescue the market — a rescue, not a reason to hold the bonds through it.

TLT is a fund that holds long-term US government bonds; it goes up when long-term interest rates fall. After avoiding it for a long time, Singh is buying again because he thinks rates are near their high for 2026 — the 10-year around 4.5% and the 30-year around 5%.

The catalyst is the Iran peace deal: if it holds, oil prices and the inflation scare fade, which lets long-term rates drift down and TLT rise. It's also a bet that the worst of the energy-driven inflation shock is behind us.

TLT holds long-dated US government bonds (20+ years). Their prices are very sensitive to interest-rate moves — that sensitivity is called "duration," and long bonds have a lot of it, so they swing hard. With the 30-year yield around 5%, Hay sees a tactical trade: if stocks sell off, scared money rushes into these bonds and their price jumps.

But he's clear it's only a trade — "those rallies are to be sold." He won't hold long bonds for years because future government deficits mean a flood of new bond supply, which pushes prices down. He prefers shorter-term treasuries, where you roughly keep up with inflation and keep your flexibility.

TLT holds long-term U.S. government bonds (those maturing in 20+ years). "Everyone's losing money in TLT," he says — long-dated bonds have steadily bled since 2022, in the U.S., U.K. and France alike.

The deeper point: the classic "60/40" portfolio relied on bonds rising when stocks fell. Since 2022 that offset has broken — stocks and bonds now fall together — so long bonds no longer protect you, and the money keeps fleeing into hard assets.