Bank of America has a line going around this weekend: “AI trades” are the last line of defense for the Treasury market. A Substack that picked it up shortened it to “the AI put,” the only thing standing between stocks and the bond market.

I’d read that as saying that if AI stocks crack, holders sell whatever is liquid to cover losses, and the liquid thing is Treasuries. So the earnings of a handful of chip and cloud companies are quietly underwriting the bond market. A month ago the fashionable floor was the Bessent put, which was cushioning stocks and not bonds. Floors seem to get replaced faster than anyone retires the word.

What gets me is where the money for this one comes from. Broadcom lending Anthropic up to $42 billion to lease its chips. SoftBank selling junk bonds to fund the AI push. Oracle citing force majeure on a data center. The floor is partly financed by the same sector it’s supposed to protect. A put written by the thing it insures can feel very solid right up until the day it isn’t. Taleb would have a short word for that, and I suspect it’s rude.

Meanwhile, the other oil story is smaller but neater. Trump ruled out the diesel export ban only after the G7 agreed to release 100 million barrels from reserves, which Politico says Europe is calling blackmail. The ban worked as a threat. Its price was other countries’ stockpiles, and a stockpile can only be spent once. Middle East supply is nearly back to prewar levels, so the oil part of the shock may be fading just as the bond part gets its turn.

Which of these floors gets tested first?

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