- In the next twelve months, around $9.6 trillion in US government debt will need to be refinanced, with direct relevance to Bitcoin.
- Yield curve control could be back on the agenda by 2027 at the latest, which could price Bitcoin in early as a “liquidity seismograph”.
A refinancing problem is growing in the US markets and this could put the Fed under pressure faster than many would like. For Bitcoin and crypto, this is more than background noise from the macro.
Furkan Yildirim calculates: In the next twelve months, around $9.6 trillion in US national debt will have to be refinanced – around a third of the total debt. This is relevant for Bitcoin because it becomes a liquidity question: Who will absorb these emissions – and under what conditions?
Yildirim writes on X:
“Nearly $10 trillion in U.S. government debt needs to be refinanced over the next 12 months. That’s not a typo. That’s a third of all outstanding U.S. government debt.”
He shows a chart: According to him, the “green line”, i.e. the debt due within a year, rises to $9.6 trillion. Short runners therefore make up 33%. This means that changes at the short end have an immediate impact on the state budget.
Why 2027 could be the most important year for financial markets since 2008
Nearly $10 trillion in U.S. government debt needs to be refinanced over the next twelve months.
That’s not a typo.
That’s a third of all outstanding U.S. government debt.
And it is… pic.twitter.com/T61BXf0fjs
— Furkan Yildirim (@FurkanCCTV) February 15, 2026
What this means for Bitcoin
The sticking point is today’s interest rate levels – and an interest burden that is already high. Yildirim writes that interest payments are “over a trillion dollars per year.” And even an increase of 0.25 percentage points means “an additional 95 billion” – year after year.
From Yildirim’s point of view, what makes matters worse is that Treasury Secretary Bessent himself admitted that the window for cheap long-term financing in 2021/2022 had been missed. Instead, the financing is repeatedly rolled out via short-term T-bills. This means that the state is much more dependent on interest rates – and every fluctuation hurts more quickly.
The big question is how Kevin Warsh – Trump’s nominee for Fed Chair – would handle this. Warsh was a Fed governor and comes from a Wall Street background. He is considered a hawk who threw down quantitative easing (QE) in protest in 2011 and criticized the Fed’s excessive balance sheet for years.
At the same time, Warsh has argued for interest rate cuts since the end of 2025 – citing AI-related productivity gains that could enable growth without inflation. The problem is that Warsh also emphasizes that the balance sheet must shrink, not grow.
Yildirim derives a trilemma from this – none of the options is particularly comfortable.
Option 1: Lower your balance sheet further – and accept higher long-term interest rates. If the Fed does not replace maturing securities, the private market will have to absorb the duration. This could push up long-term interest rates – bad for real estate, stock valuations and ultimately also for government refinancing.
Option 2: Maintain the balance sheet and effectively cap long-term interest rates. That would be exactly the “monetary dominance” that Warsh criticizes: the Fed as a permanent buyer of government bonds.
Option 3: Push mature long-distance runners more into short-distance runners. A time-buying strategy that turns the balance sheet “effectively into a variable-rate liability.”
Yildirim’s most likely view is a mixed strategy: cutting interest rates at the short end while the balance sheet continues to shrink. Citadel Securities is cited as the origin of an idea that is described as a “financial conditions-neutral” approach: What tightening the balance sheet brings should be offset by the interest rate cut.
Why does this become a “2027 trade”? Yildirim explains:
“If 9 to 10 trillion dollars have to be refinanced every year. If at the same time the deficits are over 6% of GDP. If foreign buyers, especially China, withdraw and the demand for US government bonds declines structurally.”
Then at some point only one solution remains: “The Fed will have to buy again. On a large scale.” Not immediately, not in 2026 – but “by 2027 or 2028 at the latest” yield curve control will be back on the table, i.e. directly capping long-term interest rates through large bond purchases.
As a harbinger, Yildirim cites “reserve management purchases” since December 2025: officially no QE, but in fact balance sheet expansion through purchases of short-term treasuries. His findings: The balance sheet is growing again, slowly and under a different label.
Yildirim calls Bitcoin a “liquidity seismograph”; In his view, the correlation between the Fed’s balance sheet and price is “empirically well documented.” He refers to episodes such as 2019 (QT stopped, balance sheet up again), 2020/2021 (balance sheet from 4 to almost 9 trillion, Bitcoin up to 69,000) and 2022 (QT, Bitcoin up to 15,000). His key question is therefore timing, not direction: “The central question is not whether there will be more liquidity. The question is when. And how much.”
The next few months will show whether the USA will roll through this in an orderly manner – or whether more monetary policy will have to intervene again in the end. If that happens, Bitcoin will likely be the first to price it in.
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