Have you ever thought that buying US stocks now isn’t really about buying “companies,” but rather about buying “hard currency”?

A lot of people are confused: with real interest rates (TIPS yields) so high, stock valuations should theoretically be suppressed, so why is the S&P still soaring? The answer might surprise you—the market is treating tech giants as “digital gold” to hoard.

Think about it, are retail investors frantically snapping up Nvidia and Apple stocks all just because they’re optimistic about AI prospects? Not necessarily. The deeper logic is: no one dares to hold cash anymore. Some analysts conducted an experiment—repricing US stocks in gold (instead of dollars). Guess what happened? The trends immediately aligned with employment data, rising and falling as fundamentals dictate.

What does this tell us? A large part of those seemingly impressive gains is actually fiat currency quietly shrinking in value. The so-called “stock market bull run” may simply be the dollar continuously bleeding out. For crypto investors, this logic should sound familiar—when people lose faith in paper money, all scarce assets become safe havens.