3 Sunday Morning Thoughts – August 2 Edition

Written by Bryan Lutz, Edtior at Dollarcollapse.com:

I hope you’re having a restful Summer Sunday.

Here’s what we do.

Every Sunday I share a few thoughts with you, and other subscribers at Dollar Collapse.

Sometimes we’ll talk about economics, sometimes recent events, and other times, life.

Here are three thoughts for this morning:

1. The US Treasury continues to manage the cost of bonds the best they can: by buying back long-term bonds. That attempts to reduce the cost of borrowing and interest rate expenses, but nothing stops this train…

The US Treasury bought back $2 Billion of its own long-dated bonds this week.

That means the government paid off some old debt early.

Investors wanted to sell $21.9 billion, but the US Treasury took only bought around 10% of that at $2 billion.

It was the fourth buyback for the month of July, which brings buybacks to a total of $10.7 billion in all…

They say it keeps the bond market running smoothly, but really it’s a bandaid. And, it’s marking a shift in how the US Treasury is operating. They’re moving from selling long-term bond yields to selling more short-term yields to manage the yield curve.

In turn, the US Treasury will sell shorter new bonds to cover the cost. As a result, the yield curve flattens for a while, but…

The 30-year rate still will not drop.

There is more money in the system than ever, $23.155 trillion.

For the US More money should mean lower rates.

Not this time…

A lasting 5% costs taxpayers billions in interest every year, which causes the government to borrow more. That increases interest expenses, and the overall debt.

Nothing stops this train.

2. Keep your books. They are a valuable source of getting to the truth. AI will change the way we understand truth.

I’ve started to see videos like these being shared across X. The claim is that AI companies are destroying books so that they can feed them into a scanner and acquire their own digital databases.

I can’t see why videos like this would happen when there are many other viable alternatives.

If the video below is true, we need to keep and care for our books.

WTF

AI companies are purchasing large quantities of used and rare books. Scanning their contents to train models. Then turning the originals to pulp.

The sum of human thought, digitized and shredded.

Every book that gets scanned disappears from the physical world permanently.… pic.twitter.com/zCDV0tFaci

— Shruti (@heyshrutimishra) July 29, 2026

I’m referencing Neil Postman’s ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’. He says that typographic thought creates demands on how we understand truth and knowledge. For example, the printing press created universities where every academic paper needed to be referenced to other works. This is opposed to the wise elder who carries proverbs and aphorisms for the community’s sake – to understand the truth.

Now consider quizzing an AI as a source for truth. What we are concerned about is the source… the database, and how that database is put together.

If you want to think well, or at a higher level of cognition, then you want to gather for yourself different mediums that can lead to the truth of a matter.

Let’s hope that X is just being X. It is a source of truth and sometimes the videos aren’t what they seem.

That being said, I prefer this method of acquiring new data for the database.

In this machine I can scan 1000s pages a day and never destroy a book.

No guillotine spines, no ripped the bindings..

just a normal book ready to be treasured for centuries.

Any large AI company can afford this both financially and ethically. pic.twitter.com/6oTvsJkEj1

— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) July 28, 2026

3. On the note of US Treasuries buying back more long-term bonds, they’re going to be doing a lot more of that. As a result, hard assets are going to go much higher soon.

The problem with the fiat system is debt. The whole system is designed around debt.

The more money that is provided to stimulate the system, the more the government must borrow… and pay back!

Within the next year the US Treasury will need to pay back $8 Trillion in US Treasury loans, but there’s something more important to look at… the trend.

Kevin Warsh is in trouble. pic.twitter.com/Q1rYhRIBQL

— Martin Pelletier (@MPelletierCIO) July 28, 2026

The trend is showing the parabolic expense cost of the fiat system.

The more it grows. The more debt, the more hard assets will increase in value.