Interview on ‪@AlArabiyaBusiness‬ on August 31st, 2026

The most instructive price in the world right now is not American, it is Japanese: the 10 year JGB at roughly 2.95% sits at a level last seen three decades ago, and because Japanese institutions have spent a generation exporting savings into foreign duration precisely because there was nothing worth owning at home, a domestic yield that finally competes withdraws the quiet bid that has suppressed term premia everywhere else, which is a large part of why the US 10 year has climbed to around 4.78% and its highest since January 2025 without a single new piece of fiscal news to explain it. Sitting underneath that repricing is a supply shock that monetary policy simply cannot reach, with wheat up roughly 16% on the month to a three year high on Russian and Ukrainian export disruption and the wider grain complex following it higher, this is the awkward variety of inflation, because a central bank can slow a mortgage application, it cannot plant a field or reopen a shipping lane. Gold sits at the intersection of all of this and is routinely misread as a result, since the marginal seller in any given week is a leveraged ETF holder or a futures speculator reacting to the rate path, while the persistent buyer is a central bank or sovereign fund diversifying reserves for reasons that are political rather than tactical and that never consult a chart, so weakness in the paper market tells you far less about the physical trajectory than most commentary assumes. My own view, and it runs against pricing that currently assigns roughly a two thirds probability to a September hike, is that the Fed waits this month and moves before the year is out, which if correct means the next repricing is not a change in direction at all but a change in timing, and those are usually the ones that do the most damage to positioning.