BTC High-Yield Credit Spread: 2.7
The extra interest the riskiest American companies must pay on top of what the US government pays. It is the cleanest single reading of how nervous credit markets are — and credit usually gets nervous before stocks and crypto do.
Companies with weak credit ratings — 'junk' or high-yield borrowers — have to pay more to borrow than the US government does. This chart is that gap, in percentage points.
A reading of 3.8 means those companies pay 3.8 points more per year than a US Treasury bond of comparable life.
Low and calm means lenders are relaxed and money is cheap for everyone, including the leveraged corners of crypto. A fast widening means lenders are pulling back, and that has historically shown up in credit before it shows up in bitcoin.
The direction and the speed matter far more than the level: a jump of a point in a fortnight says more than any absolute number.
Published as-is by ICE Data Indices and redistributed by FRED; we store and draw the daily reading without altering it. 'Option-adjusted' means the price of the borrowers' early-repayment rights has already been stripped out, so the number is a clean risk premium.
Business days **only** — no weekend or US-holiday reading, and none is invented. History depth is whatever the source serves us: at the time of writing that is 793 readings starting 2023-07-28, so this chart cannot show you 2008 or 2020, and it does not pretend to. The chart's own range chips will **never** show more than the data we actually hold. ALERT THRESHOLD.
The credit-spread alert fires at 4.0375 percentage points — the MEASURED 95th percentile of the 786 business-day readings we hold (2023-07-28 → 2026-07-27). Crossed 12 times on that history, 6 up and 6 back, about 4.0 a year. Read the window honestly: three years, containing no credit crisis, so the alert reports a three-year extreme and nothing larger.
ICE Data Indices, LLC — ICE BofA US High Yield Index Option-Adjusted Spread, via FRED series BAMLH0A0HYM2.
FRED BAMLH0A0HYM2 — ICE BofA US High Yield Index option-adjusted spread · business-daily · percentage points