Ten-year Treasuries ended September at 5.29%, the highest close since 2002, and held near that level into October: 5.28% at the close on Friday Oct 2nd. Bond volatility broke back above 100. Nearly all of the move came through real yields: the 30-year TIPS yield set another new high for its daily series on Oct 2nd, while breakevens barely moved.
Change from Aug 28 to Nov 6, 2026. Yields are Treasury par-curve closes. The Nov 6th figures are the latest prints and may be revised.
This page is a result of recent conversations I've been having with friends in the CRE world who are managing real books of business through this volatility. The recurring themes of these conversations and the central question of "How much worse is this going to get?" are addressed here. I won't waste your time with my useless prediction of where rates go but I will share how someone trading rates might evaluate the current market. My observation from 20+ years in CRE is that most people fail to acknowledge that if you are a CRE investor, lender or broker, you are a leveraged rates trader whether you like it or not. The only real difference is your timeframe and that is dictated by your professional seat. If all this is true, you should at the very least understand how the market you are trading actually works. I've highlighted the key market gauges to watch and what I believe provide the best context for understanding the W in WTF. The charts are all interactive across timeframes so play around and let me know what you think.
If you want to understand how much rates matter not just to CRE but to all assets then you need to put it in context with all of the assets in the world. Spoiler: They are the most important thing. There is only one market that ultimately forces all US Presidents to bend the knee; debt. The world owes about $368 trillion, roughly twice the value of every listed company on earth. Traded bonds ($168 trillion) were slightly larger than stocks at the end of 2025. This year's stock rally has put stocks back ahead. Only real estate is bigger, and a large share of it is financed with loans. Each of these assets is priced off the Treasury curve. A move of more than 50bp in the 10-year, as in September, reprices all of them.
The MOVE index tracks one-month implied volatility on Treasury options, measured in basis points. Think of it like a VIX for bonds. It doesn't predict what prices of bonds might be but rather how crazy the ride might be. Its 20-year average is . It rose from 71 on Aug 28th to a high of 110.5 on Sep 30th. Its first close above 100 since the March 2026 spike came on Sep 24th. That is far below the 2008 record of 264.6 and the 2023 bank-failure peak of 182.6. For the first time since March, though, rates volatility is priced like a stress episode.
Futures contracts are generally how people trade rates and hedge exposures. They are highly leveraged instruments so things can go really well or really poorly for you if you decide to dabble. ZB is the symbol for the current 30-year contract and ZN for the 10-year. Futures pricing along the full rates curve provides the best context for market expectations. Each chart below plots the back-adjusted continuous front month futures contract against its rolling mean, with bands at ±1σ, ±2σ and ±3σ of the closing price over the chosen window. The chart helps to sort out what feels extreme from what actually is extreme based on actual volatility and prices. Standard deviation bands are one of my favorite tools to use to keep myself from getting extra stupid.
How to read the chart. The dashed line is the average price over the chosen time frame. The shaded bands show how far price usually moves from that average. Grey is the normal range which represents +1 to -1 standard deviations where price sits about 68% of the time. Yellow is +2 to -2 and encompasses 95% of all prices. Red is rare and shows the +3 to -3 band which captures 99% of all price action meaning a +/- 3 SD reading should only happen 1% of the time. This assumes the normal price distribution shape of a bell curve and this research brief is not going to get into whether price distribution is actually normal in real life. Use these standard deviation bands as a map to see how far off the beaten path you really are.
The bands show the rising volatility in the bond market. ZB's 20-day standard deviation nearly quadrupled, from 0.53 to 1.99 points. On the 50-day window, ZB closed at or beyond −3σ in each of the last four sessions of September. ZN fell from 107'28 to 104'06.5 at month-end. Its most extreme reading was −3.25σ on Sep 10-11. The 30-year contract, not the 10-year, is carrying the more extreme moves. This lines up with the real-yield and term-premium story in the cash market.
Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) are what people buy to protect their purchasing power from inflation. They are issued in a variety of durations with the 30-year series being the longest. You get paid a fixed interest rate and then the principal amount is adjusted based on actual inflation. Treasury's daily 30-year real yield starts on Feb 22, 2010, when the 30-year TIPS returned after an eight-year gap. The series fell below zero from 2020 into 2022 (low of ), then rebuilt through the 2022 hiking cycle. On Oct 2, it closed at , the highest in the series. The 30-year breakeven rate (nominal minus real) moved only from 2.26% to 2.29% between Aug 28 and Oct 2. The market is not pricing more inflation. It is demanding more real compensation to hold duration.
Corporate bonds are one of my favorite proxies for how worried or not worried the market might be. Tracking the relationship between Investment Grade (IG) and junk bonds is a useful exercise to test your personal bias on if we heading off a cliff or everything is awesome. There are two indexes to use for this: ICE BofA US High Yield index tracks junk bonds, rated below investment grade. The ICE BofA US Corporate index tracks investment-grade corporate bonds. Both lines are effective yields. On Oct 2nd the junk yield was 8.13% and the investment-grade yield 6.03%, the highest for investment grade since November 2023. Investment-grade yields rose 59bp from Aug 28, about the same as the 10-year Treasury's 55bp. Junk yields rose 111bps during that time.
To get a view on the most degen sector of the market I look at the ICE BofA CCC & Lower US High Yield index. It tracks the lowest-rated junk bonds (AKA...real dog shit). Its yield rose from 14.62% on Aug 28 to 16.93% on Oct 2, up 231bp, against 111bp for the whole junk index. Its record is 45.02%, on Dec 15, 2008. The 17% yield barrier on this lowest tier of credit has some historic significance as a precursor for trouble ahead.
The gap between IG and Junk is the extra yield investors demand to take more credit risk. It widened from 1.58 points on Aug 28 to 2.10 on Oct 2. It is still tighter than on 88% of days since 1997, and well below its 3.57-point long term average. In the 2008 financial crisis it reached 14.86 points (Dec 15, 2008); in March 2020 it reached 6.70.
Source: ICE BofA US High Yield Index, ICE BofA CCC & Lower US High Yield Index and ICE BofA US Corporate Index, effective yields, daily from Dec 31, 1996, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED). FRED now shows only the last three years of these series; the earlier history is TradingView's copy of the same FRED series. The two sources agree where they overlap.
The selloff came in two legs. From Aug 28 to Sep 16, strong data and a hawkish Fed pushed the front end: the 2-year rose from 4.34% to 4.74%, and the 10-year reached 5% on Sep 15. The Fed raised rates 25bp to 3.75–4.00% on Sep 16, its first hike since 2023, and long yields briefly rallied.
The second leg, from Sep 23rd, centered on the long end. A strong flash PMI, Brent back above $100 on the Iran conflict, hawkish Fed speakers and a weak 5-year auction lifted the 10-year 15 bps on Sep 23rd, its largest one-day move of the month. The MOVE jumped from 79 to 95 that day and to 105 the next. By Sep 30th the 30-year was at 5.64%, its highest close since 2001.
Three key points describe the price action for me. First, the move is real yields, not inflation: breakeven inflation rates were flat while real yields rose about 38 bps on 30 year bonds. Second, volatility is repricing from low levels: the MOVE was near 71 at the start of the month, below its long-run average. Third, the curve bear-flattened first and then bear-steepened, which points to term premium and supply, not only the policy path.
October opened the same way. On Oct 1st the 10-year touched 5.34% early in the day, its highest since April 2002, then closed at 5.24%. On Oct 2nd, September payrolls rose only 29K against about 85K expected, July and August were revised down by a combined 60K, and unemployment rose to 4.2%. Yields fell at first, with the 10-year near 5.18%, but closed higher at 5.28%. Next potential catalysts: September CPI, the Oct 28th FOMC, and the Nov 4th quarterly refunding (QRA).
Asset values (section 01): Values are gross and in U.S. dollars, and they overlap. Mortgages finance property, listed REITs are also stocks, and bank loans fund all of it. The blocks show how large each market is, not net wealth. Dates differ by source (end-2024 to Oct 2026). Solid blocks are the latest published values; hatched areas are Reath Labs Estimates that move each value to 2 Oct 2026 with price changes plus new supply. Stocks (+14%): world stock prices (Vanguard Total World index fund), plus SpaceX's market value since its June listing, less net buybacks (share buybacks minus new share sales, H1 2026 pace). Traded bonds (+4.2%): bonds outstanding in the six largest markets in their own currencies (BIS, to Q1 2026), extended two quarters at each market's 2025 growth rate, then converted at 2 Oct exchange rates. A 1% move in the dollar changes this estimate by about $1 trillion. Bonds are counted at face value, so price falls do not shrink them. Loans and other borrowing: total global debt (IIF, Q2 2026) minus estimated traded bonds at Q2 2026; not rolled forward. Gold (+3.2%): World Gold Council stock at end-June plus one quarter of mine output, at the 2 Oct price. Homes (+7.5%): price change by region (U.S. 18%, China 26%, rest 56%; Fed, BIS house prices, currency moves) plus net new housing (China completions; U.S. net investment rate for the rest). Commercial (+8.3%): U.S. share (about 45%) with the Green Street price index, the rest with BIS euro-area and Japan prices and currency moves, plus net new construction at the U.S. rate. Farmland is not updated because no global farmland price index covers 2025–26. Not shown: derivatives, whose notional value was $844.6 trillion at end-2025 and whose gross market value was $22.8 trillion (BIS). Notional is a reference amount, not invested capital. Private equity and private credit are also not shown; no consistent global figure is published, and much of private credit already sits inside the debt figure.
MOVE: daily closes, Jan 2006 onward. The 6 Nov value is the latest print. Yields: U.S. Treasury daily par yield curve and daily real par yield curve. Futures: daily bars (close and volume) for every quarterly ZB and ZN contract from FirstRate Data, Nov 2007 to 5 Nov 2026. The continuous series switches on the session after the first day from which the next contract's volume exceeds the expiring contract's every day. Back-adjustment is additive: at each switch, the close of the new contract minus the close of the old contract, both on the last bar before the switch, is added to all earlier bars. Bands are the rolling mean ± k × rolling standard deviation of back-adjusted closes over the selected window.