MacroSnaps20 September 2026
No. 71The world's bond market is worth about $161 trillion. That is more than every share on every stock exchange, more than a year of the whole world's output, and five times all the gold ever mined.
Bonds
$161trn
US Treasuries are $32trn of it
Shares
$158trn
every listed company
World output
$118trn
one year of world GDP
Gold
$31trn
all 222,600 tonnes ever mined
Crypto
$2.6trn
every coin
Trillions of US dollars. Bonds and shares are SIFMA's world totals for the end of 2025. Output is world GDP for 2025. Gold is every tonne ever mined, at today's price. Crypto is every coin, today.
Why this is happening
- A bond is a loan that can be sold on, and governments are the biggest borrowers. The US government alone owes $32 trillion of the total, a fifth of the world's bonds, and the Federal Reserve holds $4.6 trillion of that.
- Every other borrowing cost is priced off government bonds: mortgages, company loans, car finance, credit cards. When bond investors demand a higher yield, the cost of money rises for everyone, whatever a central bank or a finance minister says.
- Most of it is held for ordinary people or by the state itself: pension funds, insurers, banks and central banks. So a bond crash is never just a Wall Street problem. It hits your pension, your bank and your government's budget at once.
The take
This is why the bond market gets its way. A share is a bet on one company. A bond is a promise to repay, and $161 trillion of promises are repriced every second by investors who can sell. When they demand more, governments cut spending, central banks raise rates and prime ministers resign. James Carville, in 1993, wanting to be reincarnated as the bond market: "You can intimidate everybody."