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The Middle East is at war, the US's third aircraft carrier strike group is heading to the Persian Gulf, and oil prices have risen more than 80% this year. In any textbook, this should be the "safe-haven highlight moment" for gold and BTC. So what happened? Gold closed at $3995 on Friday, down 4% for the week, marking its worst weekly performance since June. It once dropped to $3975 during the session, failing to hold the psychological $4000 level. BTC was even more straightforward. On the 24th, it directly fell below $80,000, with $800 million liquidated in 24 hours and 213,000 people forcibly liquidated. The next day it climbed back near $81,000, like a drunkard unsure of where to go. The war did not drive funds into "safe-haven assets." The war drove funds into US Treasuries. The 10-year US Treasury yield fell below 5% on Thursday, closing at 4.961%, the first time in a month. An interest-bearing asset with yields going down, yet funds keep flowing in. A non-interest-bearing asset with prices falling, yet funds keep flowing out. Berenberg analysts gave this phenomenon a polite name: "notable divergence." In plain language: safe-haven assets are falling during a risk-off market, which is unusual. Even harsher, they added: the last time gold performed this poorly when US Treasury yields dropped sharply was December 2008—the deepest month of the global financial crisis. Why are gold and BTC both getting hit? CME Chief Economist Erik Norland pinpointed the root cause in one sentence: the biggest driver of precious metals' decline this year is the market's shift in expectations from rate cuts to rate hikes. When rates were cut, the opportunity cost of holding gold was low, so no interest was no problem. Once rate hike expectations return, the cost of holding gold rises, while US Treasuries start paying you interest. Money isn’t stupid. It just moved. Berenberg also added a detail: gold has been treated as a speculative asset over the past year. It surged to a historic high of $5400 in January, and now has fallen more than one-fifth from that peak, with speculative positions exiting. BTC has no excuse of "speculative positions exiting." From start to finish, it is an asset with no cash flow, no yield, only volatility. In this interest rate environment, gold at least still has the inertia of "once being a safe haven," but BTC doesn’t even have that layer of inertia. Safe-haven assets have not been abandoned. It is the "no-interest" attribute that is being systemically discounted. Gold falls not because the world is not chaotic enough. BTC falls not because the blockchain is not decentralized enough. It’s because on the same risk-off night, someone put money into interest-bearing assets and then turned off the lights to sleep. War did not drive funds into gold and BTC. War drove funds into US Treasuries. This is not a failure of safe-haven assets. This is a systemic discount on the "no-interest" attribute under the current macro environment. $BTC $XAU $BZ