Have U.S. Treasuries Lost Their Momentum? Evidence From a New Taxonomy of Safe Assets

This paper proposes a new empirical taxonomy of safe assets based on their safe-haven behavior during periods of global risk aversion. Our multi-criteria framework captures the persistent performance of bond securities, currencies, and alternative assets during episodes of acute risk-off sentiment, allowing us to construct a cross-asset ranking of safe-haven behavior by asset characteristics: global safe assets, credit-sensitive assets, and emerging assets. We find that sovereign bonds issued by G10 economies, including U.S. Treasuries, consistently exhibit the strongest safe-haven behavior. A limited set of corporate bond markets displays partial safe-asset characteristics, while gold is the only alternative asset that consistently scores highly across our safe-haven criteria, particularly during periods of geopolitical risk. We further show that U.S. Treasuries have exhibited weaker safe-haven properties since the pandemic, although this reflects a broader reconfiguration of global safe-asset hedging properties rather than a uniquely U.S. decline. We find that weaker safe-haven properties are associated with higher inflation, debt levels and scarcity of available assets.