Every three months, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) — the Basel-based institution known as the “central bank of central banks” — publishes its Quarterly Review, a report that doesn’t move markets in the short term but is followed closely by central bankers and institutional asset managers because it traces, with the BIS’s characteristic method and caution, the threads connecting rates, currencies, commodities and equities.

The latest edition came out on September 14, 2026, opening with a chapter carrying an eloquent title, «Yields climb, yet risk appetite holds firm», covering the period from June 1 to September 3, 2026. As is customary for these opening chapters, it isn’t signed by a single economist but is credited collectively to the institution’s Monetary and Economic Department.

«Government bond yields continued their upward march, especially at the longer end of the curve, driven by a monetary policy path expected to be more restrictive and by rising term premia,» the BIS writes, noting that between early June and early September 10-year yields rose by 31 basis points in the United States, 34 in Germany, 27 in Japan and 24 in the United Kingdom, with 30-year yields at decades-long highs in several jurisdictions.

About 40% of that increase, according to BIS estimates, is attributable not to inflation fears but to the rise in the term premium — the compensation investors demand for holding long-term debt — a dynamic linked, the report explains, to «fiscal pressures rather than inflation concerns».

On the euro area, the report is even more direct: «these pressures have been amplified by a steady widening of sovereign spreads, while swings in energy prices have returned to the center of attention». Despite this, the BIS concludes, «investor risk appetite has fluctuated, but has overall proven resilient», with European and emerging-market stock markets outperforming a Wall Street that is more uncertain on tech stocks.

The report also devotes a passage to the yen, noting that the Japanese currency, after depreciating on the back of the interest-rate differential, staged «a sharp recovery on July 31, following a joint official intervention by Japan’s Ministry of Finance and the US Treasury».

It should be noted that the BIS report is a snapshot frozen at September 3 and therefore does not include the renewed widening of the Italian spread seen in recent days, just ahead of Moody’s review of Italy’s sovereign rating due later the same day (September 25, 2026), nor the Federal Reserve’s more recent hawkish statements. The BIS, for its part, never mentions Italy in connection with yields or sovereign spreads in the opening chapter (the only reference to Italy in the entire document is a historical footnote, in a box on US Treasury buyback programs, noting that Canada, Japan, Italy and the United Kingdom have run such programs «over the past three decades» — unrelated to the market dynamics of recent months). Its framework focuses on the core markets (the United States, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom) and treats the euro area as a whole, which calls for a cautious reading when applying this macro analysis to Italy’s specific debt situation, where idiosyncratic factors — rating, deficit, the election calendar — also weigh in and are not addressed by the report.

On the limits of this thesis, the BIS itself urges caution, noting that its term-premium estimates come from alternative econometric models (Adrian-Crump-Moench and Kim-Wright) that can diverge from one another, and stressing that the drivers behind the rise in the real term premium — uncertainty over future rates, possible crowding-out from Big Tech bond issuance, and public-debt sustainability — are «difficult to disentangle» with precision.

That leaves open the central question the report itself implicitly poses: if long-term yields kept rising at the pace of recent weeks, the resilience of risk appetite observed through early September might not hold in the same way. This is editorial analysis and does not constitute personalized investment advice.

Editor’s note

This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by Ufficio Studi Money.it on September 25, 2026 as «La Bri certifica il paradosso dei mercati. Rendimenti ai massimi pluriennali, ma l’appetito per il rischio non arretra». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.