The Big Squeeze: High Bond Yields Now Becoming A Problem For Stocks | Jan van Eck

October 21, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

The Big Squeeze: High Bond Yields Now Becoming A Problem For Stocks

The 10-year Treasury yield rose sharply in the third quarter, and Jan van Eck, CEO of Van Eck, calls the consequence "the bond squeeze." The mechanism is straightforward: when bonds start yielding 5% or more, and high-yield municipals reach the high single digits, those returns begin competing directly with the long-term annualized equity return of roughly 8%. "That's squeezing the rest of client portfolios," van Eck says. Over the past month, four out of five top inflow funds at Van Eck have been fixed-income vehicles.

The 10-Year Macro Framework

Van Eck approaches markets through what he calls "10-year macro"—a lens that asks whether fiscal and monetary policy are stimulative or contractionary. His current read: fiscal policy still has "at least one foot on the gas pedal," though down from the two feet of the post-COVID era. Monetary policy he describes as "kind of neutral," noting that mortgage rates are squeezing housing, IPOs have failed in Asia and the U.S., and the Fed has raised rates. Net-net, government stimulus is still supporting the economy in the short term.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **The Bond Squeeze Thesis** - Jan van Eck introduces the central theme: rising 10-year yields are squeezing other portfolio assets as fixed income becomes competitively attractive.
2 (03:08) **Van Eck's "10-Year Macro" Framework** - Jan explains the three-part framework used to analyze markets: fiscal policy, monetary policy, and technology/regulatory trends.
3 (07:06) **The Cost of Betting Against Tech** - Jan argues that underweighting tech has been a very expensive strategy, using the S&P 500's tech dominance as context.
4 (09:27) **AI Demand is Now Modelable** - A key shift: the AI trade is transitioning from a pure supply-constrained narrative to one where demand can be modeled using token usage data.
5 (14:58) **Price Discipline and Rotation Within the AI Trade** - Jan details how the market is showing discipline, with different parts of the AI ecosystem experiencing corrections and rotations.
6 (19:37) **Private Market Perspective: AI is Still Booming** - Christian Munifo, head of private growth strategies, joins to provide the private market view, confirming the AI trend is accelerating.
7 (20:36) **The Frontier vs. Open Model Debate** - Christian analyzes the dynamic between expensive frontier models and cheaper open models, showing that revenue concentration tells a different story than token consumption.

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Guests on this episode

Jan van Eck

Show Notes

Rising bond yields are starting to squeeze capital out of stocks, notes Jan van Eck, CEO of the massive ETF company VanEck.And should they go higher, the squeeze will get stronger.Jan returns to present his Q4 macro & market outlook -- we discuss the implications of this "squeeze", as well as the public *and* private side of the AI boom, India, gold, Bitcoin and more.For a chart-rich discussion on all these topics, watch this video.

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