Written by Bryan Lutz, Editor at Dollarcollapse.com:
It’s Sunday.
Alright, 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. Raising Federal Fund Rates isn’t likely to help the US Treasury bonds market out.
This week the Federal Reserve announced a .25% (or 25 basis point) raise on interest.
That means it will cost more for the US to pay back its already skyrocketing debt service cost. It also means that everyone else will have to pay back a little bit more on already tight corporate budgets. In the past, this has made US bonds more desirable, raising the price of bonds.
However, Central Banks, the ones most concerned with the value of their currency haven’t been buying it.
Foreign Private Investors now own more U.S. Treasuries than Foreign Central Banks for the first time in history 🚨🚨 pic.twitter.com/K3KWsNL3sL
— Barchart (@Barchart) September 17, 2026
Yet, look at the green line.
The foreign private sector has gone from about $3.5 trillion to $5.4 trillion since the Fed started hiking in 2022.
So, somebody is still buying. But it’s not who used to buy.
Here’s the difference. A central bank holds Treasuries because it has to. They’re reserves. They sit there for decades and nobody sells them because the yield went down a quarter point.
The private sector holds Treasuries because the coupon is good for liquidity, for trading. That’s it.
The thing is, a lot of that green line is hedge funds in the Cayman Islands running leveraged basis trades, insurers in Taiwan chasing 4% they can’t get at home, and offshore funds that need dollar collateral for the repo market…
Now, these are not patient people(they are short term thinkers).
They came in for the yield. And they’ll leave when the yield stops paying, or when the trade blows up, or when a better one comes along.
Which brings us back to Wednesday’s hike.
A 25 basis point raise makes the coupon a little sweeter. It also adds to the interest bill on $37 trillion of debt, which means more Treasuries hitting the market, which means the price of the old ones goes down.
In the past that trade-off was fine because the holders were central banks who didn’t care about the price.
Now the long-term holders care about nothing but the price.
So, the Fed just made Treasuries slightly more attractive to buyers who will most likely to dump them.
Meanwhile, the central banks that used to be the backstop are buying gold instead.
Because gold doesn’t have a coupon. It also doesn’t have a counterparty, an interest bill, or a sanctions risk.
Even though bond price go up, gold price go up my friends.
2. The Bitcoin cycle may have hit the bottom already, and even after this week’s rate hike Bitcoin is on its way up.
According to its cycle, Bitcoin may have already hit bottom.
Every four years, the Bitcoin market experiences “crypto winter”, which is basically a harsh, bitter, long existence of thinking over one’s losses. If not, it lags behind you everywhere you go. Kind of like someone who bought silver at the top in 80s and has held ever since… Except the cycle is only 4 years. (Some thoughts on silver profit next).
Bear Market Bottom Comparison. #Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/ywWqyLQIFC
— Root 🥕 (@therationalroot) September 18, 2026
Anyway, since the federal fund rate hike this week, Bitcoin has gone up along with gold. It’s gone up about $5000, or almost 5%, which isn’t a huge move for Bitcoin, but it does show some of the market’s expectations to hedging against a US Dollar that’s also rising. (Not a typical thing btw).
*Queue the Ryker side-eye while Picard stands up on the bridge of the Enterprise boldly proclaiming “ReD aLeRt.”
Usually peeps don’t buy into assets considered as hedges when the US dollar’s value rising.
3. The Miners Aren’t Dead, They Were Just Cheap: Gold miners broke a 13-year base, and silver miners are next.
Remember, there are guys who bought gold miners in 2011…
For thirteen years, those guys have watched gold go from $1,200 to over $4,000 while his mining stocks did roughly nothing against it.
So, this week I listened to Michael Oliver on the What the Finance podcast, and he pointed at a chart I hadn’t looked at in a while.
It’s the Philadelphia Gold & Silver Index (XAU) divided by the price of an ounce of gold.
In other words, what are the miners worth relative to the metal they dig up?
Here’s the chart, updated through this week:
From 1985 to 2008, miners traded between 18% and 35% of the gold price. Normal was somewhere in the mid-20s.
Then 2008 hit, and the ratio collapsed all the way to 4% in December 2015.
And since 2013 it has been stuck in a little box between 4% and 9%, which now marks 13 years of nobody wanting gold miners while everybody wanted Nvidia.
Yet, this month the ratio closed at 9.0%… the top of the box up there. When you look back at 40 years of that chart, the miners never beat gold in a falling market. When the ratio goes up, it’s because gold is going up while the miners are go up faster.
So, a breakout above 9% is not a “sell your gold and buy Newmont” signal.
It’s a “the whole complex is moving, and the miners are the accelerator” signal.
And the next real resistance on that chart is 18%, the bottom of the old range. That’s double the miners’ value relative to gold. If gold does what it usually does in a bull market on top of that, you can do the math on what the miners look like.
Which brings me back to silver.
Because if the gold miners were cheap, the silver miners were a garage sale.
Here’s the same idea, silver version. The Global X Silver Miners ETF (SIL) divided by the price of silver:
From 2022 through 2024, silver miners spent three years at their cheapest sustained level against silver since the ETF was created. The ratio couldn’t get above 140.
This week it’s at 148.
So, it’s out of the hole, above the old ceiling, and within a few points of last September’s high of 156…
It’s not a 13-year base like the gold miners have, but silver miners had a better run than gold miners in 2016 and 2020, so their box is younger and shorter.
The thing is that the direction AND reason are the same as gold.
You see, when big money decides it wants exposure to metals, it doesn’t buy bullion. Their mandates won’t let them. And it won’t buy $3 junior stocks either. They’ll buy the blue chips, in my opinion.
Which is exactly what happened in August. Wheaton Precious Metals, the closest thing silver has to a blue chip, went from $122 on August 5th to $163 on August 25th. That’s 99% of its all-time high over three weeks with nobody selling in the way.
And then it did something even more interesting.
It stopped. Sat there. Gave back about a third of the move and held. In chart-speak that’s a flag. A pole straight up, then a tight little pause while the weak hands get shaken out and the strong hands wait for the next leg.
So, I went looking for who else in the silver patch is doing the same thing.
Here are eight of them, all indexed to the August 5th low:
Top row is holding the pole. Wheaton, SSR Mining, Fortuna, Discovery Silver. Each one ran 28% to 35% off the low and gave back only about 30% of it.
Bottom row are the pure silver producers. Hecla, First Majestic, Coeur, Pan American. Same signal, same month, and they’ve already handed back half the move or more.
The names holding the flag are the ones with gold in the mix. The names bleeding in the bottom row are the ones that live and die on silver alone.
So, either the silver-heavy miners are the laggards and they catch up next, the way gold’s laggards did after every breakout on that first chart…
Or the flags fail, and the whole thing was a gold story wearing a silver hat, which is, in my opinion, unlikely.
Have a great Sunday.