In March, I wrote a post titled ‘Trust the dollar, not the Treasury’ where I argued that investors are increasingly losing trust in the US Treasury and the paper it issues, but retain faith in the US dollar. A new study by the Banque de France measured correlations between assets during periods of heightened risk aversion to assess which assets really act as safe havens.

They examined the behaviour of government and corporate bonds, currencies and a number of alternative assets like gold, silver, oil, and Bitcoin.

And to pre-empt the question that many readers will have: While Bitcoin, oil and silver have no safe haven characteristic, gold does. But gold ranks well below most government bonds or the US dollar as a safe haven asset.

Ok, with that out of the way, let us look at the ranking of government and investment-grade corporate bonds. The chart below shows the average safe haven score for these assets together with their score in individual risk aversion episodes.

Safe haven score of bonds

Source: Burban et al. (2026)

Swedish government bonds have overtaken US Treasuries, followed by Norwegian government bonds. In general, the less indebted a country is, the more its government bonds are treated as safe-haven assets – with US Treasuries the notable exception to the rule. At the bottom of the government bond ranking, we find French, Korean and Belgian government bonds, which behave as much like safe-haven assets as Japanese corporate bonds.

Note that when it comes to corporate bonds, Swedish, Norwegian, and Australian investment-grade bonds behave much the same way as a safe haven as German Bunds or Swiss Eidgenossen.

But these are long-term averages. Over time, the risk perception of investors changes, and that leads to shifts in the ranking of securities. And this is where it gets interesting for the US. The second chart shows the changing ranking of the US dollar and US Treasuries among all assets the researchers considered. And while the US dollar remains on top as the asset with the most pronounced safe haven characteristics, Treasuries are increasingly falling behind, just like they did during and after the Global Financial Crisis.

Safe-haven score of the dollar and Treasuries

Source: Burban et al. (2026)