another casualty in the economic war one theme of our posts since russia invaded ukraine is that americas economic war against russia is hurting america as we noted over the weekend sanctions on russia backfire on the west the mainstream media has belatedly started to realize this as well instead of weakening russia our sanctions have raised the prices of the raw materials russia sells swelling its current account surplus american policymakers seem to have underestimated the impact our sanctions would have on gas prices at home and they may have underestimated the impact on us treasury bonds as well but its something we wrote about here back in march betting against bonds the proshares ultrashort 20 year treasury etf nysearcatbt is a 2x levered bet against long duration us treasuries the bonds most sensitive to interest rate movements our system doesnt consider the macro picture when selecting its top names instead it gauges stock and options market sentiment to estimate which securities are likely to perform the best over the next six months nevertheless that bottomsup approach often reflects the macro picture and the inclusion of tbt certainly does as we pointed out over the weekend sanctioning ourselves us sanctions on russiaparticularly the freezing of its dollar reserveswill likely lead to a weaker dollar as nonwestern countries diversify away from the dollar to avoid having their reserves frozen by us in a future conflict in short 👉 china � sells us � treasuries to buy russian � commodities 👉 higher inflation in the us 👉 the yuan becomes a commoditybacked currency and a threat to dollar supremacy httpstcopbqitqgcc9 a likely result of that will be higher interest rates in the us as it may take higher rates to entice riskaverse noneuropean countries to hold us treasury bonds flash forward to this week and heres how tbt and our other top names from midmarch have done so far since then four of our top ten names from midmarch are up double digits so far and theyre all plays on blowback from our economic sanctions on russia our bet against treasuries tbt plus three bets on oil  gas direxion daily sp oil  gas exp  prod bull 2x shares nysearcagush united states gasoline fund lp nysearcauga and united states oil lp nysearcauso overall our top ten names from march 14th are up 1572 so far on average versus 095 for the spdr sp 500 trust nysearcaspy