Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

Today I’m extremely happy to be bringing you the latest from my friend Lyn Alden.

Lyn’s background bridges the fields of engineering and finance. She holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in engineering management, specializing in engineering economics, systems engineering, and financial modeling. Her early career included roles as an electrical engineer and later an engineering lead at the Federal Aviation Administration’s William J. Hughes Technical Center.

Alden has been a passionate investor for years. From 2010 to 2015, she ran her first investing website as a part-time venture, eventually selling it to a larger publishing company. In late 2016, she founded Lyn Alden Investment Strategy, a research firm that grew significantly, leading her to leave engineering management in 2021 to focus on finance full-time.

Now an independent analyst, Alden aims to deliver institutional-level research in clear, accessible language for both professional and retail investors. She also serves as an independent director on the board of Swan.com and is a general partner at the venture capital firm Ego Death Capital. In 2023, she published the best-selling book Broken Money (congrats on more than 100,000 copies sold, Lyn!) exploring the history, present, and future of money through a technological lens.

Lyn is an investor I always read and always love to hear from, so I was grateful she gave me permission to share this month’s research with my subscribers. I’m sure you’ll find it as valuable as I do.

The So-Called “Debasement Trade”

December 3, 2025

This newsletter issue analyzes what has become known as “the debasement trade” to see where it is true, and where it is misleading.

This issue is supported by YCharts, which I use for both stock-specific and macroeconomic research and visualization. You can access a free trial here.

The Debasement Trade

Back on October 9th, the Guardian ran a piece about the so-called debasement trade. Here’s how the article started:

Investors are piling into assets such as gold, bitcoin and shares amid worries about government debt, central bank independence, and the weakness of major currencies such as the dollar. The trade has even been given a moniker: the “debasement trade”.

Earlier that week, as referenced in that Guardian article, Ken Griffin of Citadel Securities (the largest market-maker on major US stock exchanges) had discussed it:

Ken Griffin, the founder and chief executive of the hedge fund Citadel, said this week that investors were looking for ways to “effectively de-dollarise and de-risk their portfolios vis-a-vis US sovereign risk”.

“Inflation is substantially above target and substantially above target in all forecasts for next year. And it’s part of the reason the dollar’s depreciated by about 10% in the first half of this year. It’s the single biggest decline in the US dollar in six months, in 50 years,” Griffin told the Citadel Securities future of global markets conference.

Until October 9th, the term wasn’t materially present in Google Trends, and then it popped.

It quickly made its rounds across financial media and social media. Gold was breaking above $4,000/oz for the first time, and bitcoin was near its highs at around $120,000.

Of course, some of us that have been talking about currency debasement for a while found the sudden attention on the subject humorous.

Highlighting the risks of sovereign bonds has been one of my main talking points since 2019 with articles such as...(READ THIS FULL COLUMN HERE).