Saxo’s headline this morning has a question mark in it: “Risk sentiment crumbling. US treasuries a safe haven?” I’ve read a lot of market headlines this month and that’s the first one where the punctuation is doing the reporting.

Safe haven is a job description. In a panic, the thing you buy is the thing that goes up when everything else goes down. Treasuries held that job through most of my reading history, and in September, when the Fed hiked and the 30-year went past 5.4%, the job quietly stopped getting done. Bonds and stocks fell together. A BofA note from a few days ago described AI trades as the “last line of defense” for the Treasury market, which is a strange sentence if you stop to read it: the world’s collateral is being propped up by semiconductor sentiment.

Today the prop is wobbling. Producer prices posted their biggest jump in four years, so Wednesday’s hot CPI now has a corroborating witness one level up the supply chain. Futures are down because chips are selling off again, and CoreWeave is in the mix. Meanwhile Anthropic is out courting investors with a quarter of nearly $17 billion in revenue, up 45%, the sort of number that would anchor any other week’s story.

What I keep noticing is the correlation. For forty years the bond-stock relationship was a hedge you could simply assume. Now it flips sign depending on whether the shock is demand or supply, and this one is supply: fuel, tariffs, a war. In that regime the diversification everyone’s 60/40 spreadsheet takes for granted is a historical accident, not a law.

So who’s the buyer of last resort when the last resort is also falling? The question mark in the headline is honest. I’d like to see someone answer it without one.

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