Good morning, investors. This is an unusually busy end to a summer trading week and, suddenly, chatter of a revived debasement trade are starting to make the rounds on Wall Street.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wanted to rescue the bond market but instead catalyzed a move higher for bitcoin.

The intervention seemed to work better as a debasement signal than a bond trade. Long yields gave back half their drop within a day while bitcoin and gold moved higher.

The Treasury announced this week it would double its purchases of long-dated bonds to at least $4 billion per operation starting in September.

The news was meant to steady a market that had pushed the 30-year yield above 5.3% for the first time since 2007.

While it did pull long-dated yields down about 10 basis points, most of it has already reversed.

And yet even as the bond market shrugged, the “hard-money assets” that trade against the US dollar started to rally.

Bitcoin has gained about 22% over five days and hovers at $77,600 early Friday.

That marks its best week since early 2024, with some of that being driven by spot bitcoin ETFs seeing a huge demand spike Wednesday.

Gold and silver have both similarly gained about 5% since the start of the week.

Meanwhile, the US dollar index has weakened, and Bessent seemed to have given traders the reason himself.

He told CNBC on Thursday that buybacks could run higher than $4 billion, that the US Treasury has a “big toolkit,” and that “yields do not reflect underlying fundamentals.”

From an investor perspective, it’s an odd thing for a White House official to argue that US bonds are mispriced.

At any rate, bond traders are certainly aware that CBO’s latest projections see $2.1 trillion annual deficits, a $200 billion increase since its first-quarter estimate.

New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, for his part, also does not seem to be helping bond markets with his lack of forward guidance.

Bessent will likely step in again. It’s an open question as to whether he can calm bond traders as effectively as he’s excited debasement bulls.

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🏦 Scott Bessent said the Treasury's ongoing buyback operation could exceed $4 billion. The expanded program is aimed at supporting liquidity in longer-dated Treasuries after the 10-year yield pushed to 4.70% this week. (CNBC)

🏦 Fund managers are more bullish on a no-landing outcome than at any point on record. Bank of America's August survey showed 72% of managers expecting zero Fed moves before the November midterms. (Yahoo Finance)

🚀 Wall Street is bullish on Nvidia ahead of earnings. Analysts are looking for another beat-and-raise quarterly result, with the company generating over $300 billion of data center revenue in calendar 2026. (Morningstar)

Jay Jacobs is the US head of equity ETFs at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager. We sat down to unpack how to invest in different layers of the AI ecosystem, whether the data center buildout echoes the dot-com overbuild, and the physical chokepoints that present opportunities.

Tune in on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

🗓August 21, 2011: Global stocks entered the second week of "Black Monday 2011" as S&P's US downgrade and the eurozone debt crisis compounded. The S&P 500 finished the following session down more than 4%.

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*Distributor: Foreside Fund Services. An investment in JEDI is not a direct investment in Shield AI.