This week, I welcomed back my friend Snek on the show to talk about something that will inevitably effect the entire global economy, but especially the tech sector, which is the bond meltdown and rising oil prices across the board.

I think we are at the point for many geopolitical reasons, foreign central banks are no longer price insensitive buyers of US Treasuries and this is part of what’s leading to surging yield globally. Of course, the surging bond issuance is another reason.

now for the AI buildout, surging bond yield is a huge problem since massive amount of issuance will need to happen. Oracle is having some real problem with that. Same with Softbank. It’s gotten so bad for Oracle that they gave Tencent a huge discount on that data center compute lease because Tencent is able to pay 30% up front. You know things are bad when that happens.

Let’s take Anthropic as an example. If you borrow $200B over a few years to pay for your data center build out and compute needs and you are facing almost junk bond ratings and 10 year yield is well over 5%. Then, your own yield could be close to 10% like it is getting there for softbank. 10% on $200B is $20B on interest per year. That changes the dynamic completely when it comes to margins on rest of your business.

So, what’s going on in the debt market really matters. We have been too used to record low interest rate. That has allowed many bad decisions and investment over time. Now, we are essentially getting back to a more historically sane interest rate, but US government is $40T in debt. Which at 5% yield means $2T in just interest payment per year. So, that is what we are dealing with here.

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