Sep 25, 2026

The 30-year par yield closed at 5.47% on Thursday, up 7bp from Wednesday's 5.40%, on Treasury's daily par curve. Zacks reported the 30-year jumped to 5.501%, its highest since June 2004, a level above the close. Only the close counts, so Bond Stress holds at ELEVATED with its worsening arrow, 3bp under the trigger (desk calc).

The 10-year closed at 5.18%, a fresh high since 2007, the 20-year at 5.53% and the 2-year at 4.87%. Friday morning the 10-year sat near 5.17% (Schwab). Reuters tied the rout to strong growth, heavy borrowing and war-driven energy costs, with the German 10-year briefly above 3.5% and Japan's 10-year at its highest since 1996.

New tracked input, not a trigger: the ICE BofA MOVE index of Treasury volatility closed 104.58 on Sept 24, up 9.13, per a Google Finance screen capture. Single source: the desk could not load a second read this run. Equity volatility stayed calm, with VIX at 15.67 (Zacks): bond volatility is doing the work equity volatility is not.

Series note: the trigger is judged on Treasury's par curve; market closes printed elsewhere can differ by a basis point or two. Counter-evidence: the close settled well below the session peak, and Treasury's expanded long-end buybacks run through Nov 4.

USD/JPY rose just above 159.00 on Thursday, its highest since early September and a fifth straight gain despite the Bank of Japan's Sept 18 hike to 1.25% (FXStreet), and closed at 158.86 (Trading Economics), 1.14 yen under the 160 close trigger (desk calc).

Friday Tokyo pushed back with words. Finance Minister Katayama said Trump expressed concern over the yen's weakness in his meeting with Prime Minister Takaichi, and that the principles behind the July 31 joint intervention remain alive (FXStreet, Trading Economics). Kyodo reported she discussed the yen's depreciation with Treasury Secretary Bessent in an online meeting (Newsquawk). The pair fell about 1.1% to about 157.10. No intervention has been confirmed.

Why it matters: a US president voicing concern about a weak yen points the same way as Tokyo, which raises the odds that a run at 160 meets joint resistance. Counter-evidence: words have not held the yen for long this month, and the rate gap with the Fed is unchanged. No session has moved three yen; Friday's drop is about 1.8 yen so far (desk calc).

Brent in yen, tracked input: about 16,930 yen a barrel (desk calc, 106.60 x 158.86), up about 12% since Sept 1 against about 13% in dollars. The desk keeps it as a tracked input, not a trigger, and reviews it with MOVE about Oct 9: two weeks of readings have tracked dollar Brent, and its direction for the yen is still ambiguous.

US spot XRP ETFs took in $14.89 million on Thursday: $9.91 million into Bitwise's XRP and $4.98 million into Franklin's XRPZ; Canary, 21Shares and Grayscale printed zero. SoSoValue and CoinGlass show the same figures, convergence on one primary source rather than two independent estimates.

Week to date: $52.95 million (desk calc: $0, $20.02M, $18.04M, $14.89M), $13.17 million above the $39.78 million weekly reference. Why it matters: XRP Flows improves to POSITIVE on two consecutive weeks at or above that reference. This week becomes the first unless Friday prints an outflow larger than $13.17 million; the week of Sept 28 would be the second. The gauge holds at NEUTRAL and takes an improving arrow.

SoSoValue's total net assets rose to $1.70 billion, 1.77% of XRP's market cap, and XRP traded near $1.58 Friday (CoinGecko).

Counter-evidence: Bitwise took about 77% of the week (desk calc), three of five funds took nothing, and trackers still disagree on cumulative totals, $1.76 billion on SoSoValue against $1.68 billion on CoinGlass. CoinGlass's overview also shows fund market caps well below SoSoValue's net assets. The desk uses only the daily flows, which match.

Brent settled at $106.60 on Thursday, up about 3.4% (desk calc from $103.08), after an intraday high just over $108 (The National); WTI settled $94.61, up 2.7% (Zacks). Reports that US and Iranian negotiators were exploring a phased deal to reopen Hormuz cut into the rally, and Brent traded near $105.31 Friday morning, down about 1.2% (Trading Economics).

Gauges: Oil Shock stays RED SHOCK, $16.60 above the $90.00 improve marker (desk calc). Macro Backdrop stays HOSTILE: the count of settles below $100.00 stays at zero of five.

What pushed it: Saudi Arabia intercepted Houthi missiles Thursday, an Iranian military adviser threatened to widen the war to the Indian Ocean, and Hormuz traffic stayed thin (The National). The phased-deal reports are unconfirmed by either government; see the Iran item.

Counter-evidence: Reuters reported the Saudi East-West pipeline restarted Sept 22, citing three sources; Aramco did not comment, and a return to its usual 4 million barrels a day could take six to eight weeks (Reuters via Quartz). A confirmed ramp-up would ease the supply side the shock reading rests on.

Foreign Minister Araghchi said in New York that the Strait of Hormuz "would be open on the end of the seventh day" if certain conditions are met (Al Jazeera). The sequence Al Jazeera lays out: fighting stops on all fronts, Lebanon included; the US lifts its naval blockade and oil sanctions and releases frozen assets; Hormuz reopens on day seven; nuclear talks follow.

Washington has not accepted it. Secretary of State Rubio said it would be wrong to describe the meeting as a major breakthrough. Reports of a phased reopening deal moved oil Thursday, but no government has confirmed terms. The Trump-Xi summit produced no Iran breakthrough: Xi said he supported returning to an interim agreement, and Trump called it a great meeting with few specifics (Al Jazeera).

On the water nothing has changed. Reuters shiptracking counted nine commodity transits Thursday, eight out and one in, against a ten-day average of 18, and now puts Wednesday at 14 (Reuters via Al Arabiya). Hormuz stays at RED DISRUPTION, zero of five sessions toward the improve test.

Why it matters: the plan puts Iran's price on the record, with the blockade, sanctions and frozen assets first. Counter-evidence to optimism: a version of this offer has circulated since Sept 22, when Iran's own semiofficial agency called it untrue.

The Federal Reserve Board requested comment Thursday on two proposals under the GENIUS Act. One sets the framework for Board-supervised payment stablecoin issuers: full backing with short-term Treasury bills and other high-quality liquid assets, standardized capital requirements, risk management and safekeeping rules. The other sets the application process. Comments run 60 days after Federal Register publication, and no issuer is named (Federal Reserve). Governor Barr backed the proposal while raising anti-money-laundering concerns (The Block).

CFTC staff updated its crypto FAQs the same day to cover investing customer funds in tokenized forms of permitted investments and using blockchain records for registrant recordkeeping. It is staff guidance, not a Commission rule, and names no token (CFTC).

Why it matters: these rulebooks decide how bank-supervised dollar stablecoins, the market RLUSD competes in, are backed and held. What it does not do: neither document mentions XRP, and posts claiming the GENIUS Act amplifies XRP's use case are opinion; XRP is not a payment stablecoin. The desk has not established whether any Ripple entity falls under the Board's proposal.

The Clearing House said Thursday that Quant's technology will run the interoperability, orchestration and transaction-management layer of its On-Chain Money Initiative, a network for clearing and settling tokenized deposits between banks. It is expected to be available to participating institutions in the first half of 2027, with connectivity to the RTP and CHIPS networks (The Clearing House). TCH's existing networks clear and settle more than $2 trillion a day; that figure describes today's rails, not the new network.

No blockchain is named, and Ripple, XRP, the XRP Ledger and RLUSD do not appear in TCH's release. Posts on monitored X accounts overlaid a token contract address on the news; it is not in the release. Quant also supports the UK's tokenized-deposit pilot, per coverage of UK Finance's announcement Wednesday (crypto.news).

Why it matters: the clearing house owned by the largest US banks is building bank-money rails, the regulated alternative to stablecoins, and the orchestration layer it chose is not Ripple's. That does not weigh on XRP demand directly, but it narrows the bank tokenized-deposit channel as a thesis for it.

The desk's first scheduled re-test of open claims settled two XRP narratives.

Project Agora: the BIS participant list names Standard Chartered, BBVA and BNY among the private firms convened by the Institute of International Finance, and does not list Ripple (BIS). The claim that Ripple is deeply integrated in Agora moves to CONTRADICTED: a roster of participants is evidence against, not silence. This verdict moves against a popular XRP narrative.

RLUSD: on-chain reads Friday show 1,369.29 million RLUSD on Ethereum (Etherscan) and 1,073.30 million issued on the XRP Ledger (XRPScan), about $2.44 billion in total with about 56% on Ethereum (desk calc). Caveat: the two are different measures, and treasury-held balances were not netted out.

Also moved: the CDCC exhibit listing Evolve and Purpose XRP ETF options for US sale is VERIFIED on EDGAR, as a roster under an existing registration, not a new US listing. The pre-meeting BOJ report is VERIFIED against the Sept 18 decision. The claim that the Venezuela deal more than doubles American oil reserves is CONTRADICTED: EIA puts US proved reserves at 46 billion barrels, and barrels in Venezuela do not enter that count. Most re-tests found no new evidence; each is logged.