Senior Wisdom: Navigating Capital and Power

Where Did the Safe Havens Go? Gold, Yen and 5.2% Yields Where Did the Safe Havens Go? Gold, Yen and 5.2% Yields By Leo Jaeyoul Lim | CEO, SEJONG DnC Market observer since the 1990s · September 30, 2026 · Macro & Rates · 14 min read The playbook says that when the world gets scarier, you buy gold, Treasuries and the yen. On September 28 and 29, 2026, all three failed the test at the same time. Gold fell 3-4% in a single session to its lowest level since early August. The U.S. 10-year yield touched 5.29% and the 30-year climbed above 5.6%, a level last seen in 2002. The yen, defended this summer with a record 15.39 trillion yen of intervention, is back near 157.5 per dollar. Only the dollar held firm. This piece argues that these are not four separate stories. When the shock is inflationary, an oil-supply war rather than a demand panic, central banks tighten, real yields rise, and the assets that pay nothing (gold) or fund the wrong currency (the yen) reprice against t...

The Memory Supercycle's Crowding-Out Problem: How HBM Is Squeezing Commodity DRAM The Memory Supercycle's Crowding-Out Problem: How HBM Is Squeezing Commodity DRAM By Leo Jaeyoul Lim | CEO, SEJONG DnC Market observer since the 1990s · September 27, 2026 · Semiconductors & Macro · 11 min read Commodity DRAM hit a fresh record in August, trading at roughly 4.4 times its price from a year earlier, according to Edaily's citation of TrendForce data. Over the same stretch, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have been the two biggest single contributors to KOSPI's climb back above 7,000. Those two facts are not a coincidence — they share a root cause. High-bandwidth memory (HBM), the chip that feeds AI accelerators, consumes wafer capacity far out of proportion to its share of total memory output, and that mismatch is now showing up simultaneously in equity indices and in enterprise IT budgets. This piece walks through the mechanism, the data behind it, and wh...

Gold, the 5% Treasury, and the Insurance Squeeze Blogger fields — Permalink: gold-treasury-yield-insurance-squeeze · Search description (156 chars): "Gold's 2026 round trip, the 10-year Treasury back above 5%, and a surprising slowdown in P&C insurance pricing — what the data says for portfolios." · Labels: Macro & Rates, Gold & Safe Havens, Insurance Gold, the 5% Treasury, and the Insurance Squeeze By Leo Jaeyoul Lim | CEO, SEJONG DnC Market observer since the 1990s · September 22, 2026 · Macro & Rates · Gold & Insurance · ~15 min read Three numbers tell most of this year's macro story if you put them side by side. Gold touched a record $5,554 an ounce on January 29, fell below $4,000 by late June, and has spent September stabilizing in the $4,300–$4,600 range. The 10-year Treasury yield, which sat at 4.48% in mid-June, has climbed almost every week since and touched 5.01% on September 14. And US property and casualty insurers, ...

Trump–Xi Summit: What It Means for Korea's Chip Boom Trump–Xi Summit: What It Means for Korea's Chip Boom By Leo Jaeyoul Lim | CEO, SEJONG DnC Market observer since the 1990s · September 21, 2026 · Geopolitics & Trade · Korea Markets · 13 min read On Thursday, September 24, Donald Trump will host Xi Jinping at the White House. The agenda reads like a global markets checklist: tariffs, rare earths, artificial intelligence and the war in Iran. Most previews treat this as a story about Washington and Beijing. I think the more revealing angle is a third capital, Seoul. South Korea's export machine has just posted its strongest first twenty days of a month on record, and almost half of it is semiconductors. Between September 1 and 20, exports reached $71.4 billion, up 78.3% from a year earlier, and chips alone were $34.1 billion. That boom sits between two governments that are still negotiating how much technology and mineral supply each will allow the other t...

Four Hikes in 22 Days: The Global Bond Repricing Explained Four Hikes in 22 Days: The Global Bond Repricing Explained By Leo Jaeyoul Lim | CEO, SEJONG DnC Market observer since the 1990s · September 19, 2026 · Macro & Rates · 14 min read Between August 27 and September 18, the Bank of Korea, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan each raised policy rates by 25 basis points. Four central banks, four identical steps, 22 days. It looks like coordination. It is not. It is four institutions reading the same oil-driven inflation signal at the same time, and the interesting question is who is actually setting the price of money as a result. My argument in this piece is that the answer has shifted. Central banks still choose the overnight rate, but the long end of the curve, which is what mortgages, corporate bonds and equity valuations are discounted against, is being priced in the government bond market. The US 10-year yield touched 5.011% ...