Peter Oppenheimer, chief global equity strategist and head of macro research in Europe at Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS), told CNBC on Tuesday that the story investors should be watching is how quickly bond yields have moved to current levels. “The markets are very, very focused on the speed of this adjustment we’re seeing not just in US interest rate expectations and bond yields, but around the world as well,” he said, according to Goldman Sachs. The direction of travel was telegraphed for months. The pace has caught allocators off guard.
His comments landed on a session in which Yahoo Finance reported the 10-year US Treasury yield moved above 5%, driving a bond selloff that rattled stocks, and Bitget flagged the same move above 5% as a new high since 2007. To gauge how compressed the timeline has been, the most recent settled 10-year print available heading into this week was 4.96% on September 11, 2026. The move through the psychologically important 5% handle came in a matter of trading days.
Oppenheimer’s Causal Chain: Capital Demand Meets the Discount Rate
Oppenheimer laid out a mechanism for why this matters beyond fixed income. Capital demand is rising from two directions at once, he argued: governments and central banks are borrowing more to fund supply chain resilience, energy security and defense, while technology hyperscalers are simultaneously raising enormous sums to build AI infrastructure. Those two bids for savings are colliding in the long end of the curve.
In his words, “There’s a big increase in demand for capital from both the private sector and from governments. And that’s having this effect also of pushing up long term interest rates and long term interest rates, in the end, affect all financial assets, credit markets, of course, bond prices, but also equities too, because they’re all related to the same kind of discount rate,” Oppenheimer said. That is the analytical core of the segment. When the risk-free rate used to discount future cash flows rises, every long-duration asset reprices, and equities carry plenty of duration.
The pressure is visible outside the US as well. Oppenheimer noted that 30-year government bond yields in Japan and Germany have climbed to around 3.5% from near zero roughly five years ago, according to Oppenheimer, illustrating that the repricing is a global phenomenon rather than a purely US Treasury story.
Bubble Question: Preserve the Hedge
Asked whether equities are in a bubble, Oppenheimer was careful to qualify his answer. “I don’t think there’s a bubble in the classic sense of excessive valuations, according to Goldman Sachs. But of course, as bond yields continue to pick up and do so at a faster pace, that is going to have some effect on equity valuations,” he said. The qualifier does real work. He is saying that today’s valuations are defensible on fundamentals, and that if yields keep rising at this tempo, those fundamentals will have to work harder to justify the same prices.
Profit Growth Is Doing the Heavy Lifting
The reason equities have absorbed the rate move so far, in his read, is earnings. “Underlying profit growth has been and continues to be very strong, according to Goldman Sachs. And that’s really why equities have been able to offset or withstand the rise in interest rates that has been developing in recent months,” Oppenheimer said.
That leaves a genuine open question for investors to sit with: can corporate earnings keep outrunning a rising cost of capital if long rates continue to grind higher, with forward chatter in some corners of the market floating scenarios of 5.5% or above on the 10-year? Oppenheimer did not answer that, and the full CNBC segment is worth watching on CNBC’s Fast Money page for his framing in context.