30-Year Treasury Yield Hits 5.64% as TINA Trade Fades and Ledger Supply-Chain Attack Reshapes Self-Custody Debate

Key Takeaways

1. The 30-year Treasury yield reached 5.64%, its highest since 2002, with 30-year TIPS real yields at their highest in over 20 years, prompting the claim that TINA is dead.
2. A widely shared analysis calls the Ledger supply-chain attack the most sophisticated against a wallet ecosystem, arguing that "good enough" self-custody advice is obsolete and multi-vendor multisig should become standard.
3. Marc Andreessen pushes back on "the software era is over," while also describing an 8,192-dimension custom token alphabet for machine-to-machine communication.
4. Morgan Housel rewrote The Psychology of Money from long chapters into 20 short story-driven ones after major US publishers rejected it; a small UK publisher took it on with a 5,000-copy first print.
5. Meb Faber and Andrew Ang discuss whether AI agent swarms can beat human investment committees, plus tax drag that quietly takes 36% of stock returns.
6. A REIT-focused post claims publicly traded REITs are priced at a negative risk premium.
7. Commentary criticizes tariff policy and MMT-linked spending, arguing tariffs have raised prices and lowered wages while exemptions flow to those with lobbyists.

1. Rates, Markets, and the End of TINA

1. The 30-year Treasury yield rose to 5.64%, the highest since 2002, with the move attributed to continued borrowing and spending in Washington and a bond market pushing prices higher. Separately, the author argues TINA (There Is No Alternative) is dead: the 30-year TIPS yield now sits 3.37 percentage points above inflation, the highest real yield in over 20 years, giving investors a genuine alternative to equities. — via 1 2
2. A market-valuation snapshot lists trailing twelve-month price-to-sales ratios: SpaceX 103, Palantir 87, CrowdStrike 52, AMD 24, Broadcom 20, NVIDIA 19, Applied Materials 13, Tesla 13, Microsoft 12, Apple 11, Google 10, Micron 9, Intel 9, Meta 8, Cisco 7, Netflix 6, Oracle 6, Amazon 4, against 3.5 for the S&P 500. The same author says he studies hundreds of charts weekly to surface the most important ones for tens of thousands of investors. — via 1 2
3. A separate post claims publicly traded REITs are currently priced at a negative risk premium, with an updated chart. — via 1

2. Security, Self-Custody, and the Ledger Attack

1. A widely shared analysis calls the Ledger supply-chain attack one of the most sophisticated ever aimed at a wallet ecosystem, more complex than Coldcard's RNG flaw because it involved cross-border company acquisitions, eSIM, LTE modules, and CPUs implanted in devices at manufacturing scale. It argues such attacks were previously theoretical or crude in Bitcoin, but complexity is rising fast, and past "good enough" wallet and self-custody advice is no longer sufficient; greater Bitcoin mainstream adoption and AI-assisted attacks could push multi-vendor multisig toward becoming the self-custody standard, described as Bitcoin self-custody's "Sputnik moment." — via 1
2. The same analysis says a passphrase does not help in the Ledger case, because the passphrase must be entered on the device at signing time and a compromised device can exfiltrate it alongside the seed phrase; generating keys elsewhere and importing them into a tampered device also fails, since the device can transmit the seed phrase on import. It notes tamper-evident measures such as transparent casings, bricking on tampering, permanent warnings after seal breakage, and encryption between internal hardware components may help, but well-resourced attackers may still bypass them, drawing a parallel to a 2008 case in which card readers tampered with on a Chinese production line sent card data and PINs to Pakistan over mobile networks. — via 1
3. Recommended mitigations include ordering directly from the vendor and using a PO box for privacy; treating any setup dependent on a single hardware or software stack, or a single vendor, as risky; technically capable users building hardware signers from commodity parts; and making multi-vendor multisig the standard with fully independent hardware and software stacks per signer. The analysis also warns that many advanced protocols rely on timelocks with simple single-signature recovery paths, which is dangerous because a timelock only delays risk: if a seed leaks, an attacker simply waits out the timelock, and any single-key withdrawal or recovery path in vault-like protocols is a potential single point of failure. It says Nunchuk's on-chain timelock-assisted wallet will add custom M-of-N recovery paths within weeks so spending requires multiple keys throughout the wallet's lifecycle. — via 1

3. Software, AI, and Investing Practice

1. Marc Andreessen says claims that "the software era is over" are thoroughly outdated, arguing computers and software will remain central to solving human problems, and expressing long-term optimism about development, programming, and Jev, along with enthusiasm for working with the CompleteSkeptic team to improve software. In a separate post, he argues the Latin alphabet is neither how machines think in latent space nor their ideal communication method, describing a custom 8,192-dimension token alphabet for machines to communicate directly in token space, inspired by an alphabet in Grimezsz's new Accelerando MV, with the first image being encoded lyrics. — via 1 2
2. Meb Faber asks whether AI agent swarms can manage portfolios better than human investment committees, introducing guest Andrew Ang — former head of factor investing at BlackRock, Columbia professor, and founder of Tau Balance. Discussion points include auto-trading "self-driving portfolios," the biggest opportunities lying where agents disagree, and "constructive dissent" in an AI committee without office politics. The conversation also covers tax drag: government's share quietly eats 36% of stock returns, a nominal 10% private credit return is only 7% after tax, and value is actually two distinct factors. — via 1
3. Morgan Housel cut a third of The Psychology of Money while writing it: he initially wrote traditional long chapters of 4,000–6,000 words each, found the material loose and full of redundancy, and rewrote it as 20 short story-driven chapters in his online writing style. The book was rejected by every major US publisher, was picked up by a small UK publisher with a first print run of just 5,000 copies, and went on to sell millions. — via 1

4. Policy and Economic Commentary

1. A widely shared critique attacks the adoption of MMT and the signing of a $1.9 trillion spending bill, noting inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 and that Democrats paid an electoral price. It also criticizes unorthodox economic voices around Trump, naming Peter Navarro for trade theories widely rejected by economists and Oren Cass, who lacks formal economics training yet serves as a self-appointed chief economist and leading defender of right-wing tariffs. The post says tariffs have raised prices and lowered wages, with exemptions flowing to those with the right lobbyists, calling the policy both arrogant and politically unhelpful. A related post frames this as the result of policies advocated by Saez, Zucman, Krugman, and Piketty, urging California voters to pay attention. — via 1 2
2. A separate post shares Singapore's Prime Minister explaining why the government does not cap prices to reduce cost-of-living pressure, and asks which Western leader today could explain the value of price signals that way. — via 1