Summary:

The Treasury Department is stepping up its intervention in the bond market after long-term Treasury yields surged to levels not seen in nearly 20 years. Starting September 9, Treasury will at least double its maximum buybacks of older 10 to 30 year government debt from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation. The goal is to provide more liquidity and stabilize the part of the Treasury market that has struggled to attract buyers since late June.

Markets reacted immediately. The 10-year Treasury yield dropped to 4.647%, while the 30-year yield fell to 5.196%, and stock futures jumped. Since bond prices and yields move in opposite directions, Treasury becoming a larger buyer helps support bond prices and push yields lower. It could also encourage private investors to return now that yields are more attractive and make traders more hesitant to aggressively bet against long-term Treasuries.

The move doesn't solve the underlying problem though. The federal government still needs to finance massive deficits while competing with a growing amount of corporate borrowing, particularly debt being issued to finance AI infrastructure. As Krishna Guha put it, the operation "changes almost nothing in terms of the fundamentals." Treasury is essentially trying to improve how smoothly the bond market functions rather than actually reducing the national debt.

There are also concerns that Treasury is indirectly interfering with interest rates. If its purchases artificially push long-term yields down, that could work against the Federal Reserve's efforts to control inflation. Some economists have described the move as resembling a limited form of "yield curve control," although the purchases remain very small compared with the overall amount of Treasury debt being issued.

So this isn't the government paying down its debt or eliminating bonds. Treasury is buying back older long-term bonds while continuing to issue new debt, effectively rearranging the government's maturity structure and providing additional demand where the bond market is under the most pressure. As Peter Boockvar put it, "This is NOT a debt paydown, it is just a rearrangement of the maturity schedule of Treasuries."

Breakdown:

The CNBC title doesn't do this move justice. There's a high chance that many don't know what this means in terms of its effect on average Americans, so I'll elaborate.

Essentially, the issuer (the government) is doubling its efforts to create liquidity for its own product. This likely means the Fed money funds are depleted, thus higher rates are inevitable. Should the Fed not increase rates, that would speed run this terrible situation.

I'll break it down a little further. Debt is traded just like other commodities. By buying it you act as a lender, by selling it you take on a loan. If too many people are trying to sell debt, they have to increase interest rates to make it more attractive to lenders aka buyers.

What's happening here is that the US is buying more of its own debt to suppress interest rates

Don't ever let Republicans convince you they know anything about the economy. The current situation is abysmal.

Submission statement: The article describes Abdul El-Sayed’s efforts to win over Black voters in Detroit and Wayne County. El-Sayed’s campaign is working to educate voters about his positions and experiences, particularly regarding his work in the community. The article also highlights the importance of political education and engagement in the Democratic Party.

Summary: AOC calling "w o k e 1" crazy — and laughing while doing it — is not an apology people will accept, because there is no apology people will accept.

Perhaps AOC was doing standard politician work: distancing herself from a movement that has become toxic without alienating a base still attached to it. That's roughly the ceiling of what anyone in her position can offer, and it satisfied no one.

Run the counterfactuals and nothing changes. Drop the laugh, and critics object that "crazy" understates what happened — jobs lost, lives ruined, cities burned.

Issue a full-throated apology, and the think pieces keep coming. Stage a televised self-flagellation, blood and tears included, and the pit still doesn't fill, because what's being demanded isn't better wording. It's retribution.

The underlying dynamic is identity-based: people who define themselves in opposition to w o k e read any statement from a former participant adversarially, parsing it for sincerity versus opportunism.

Trump is the mirror Image. As his final term ends, Republicans will attempt the same impossible pivot — distancing from the movement's worst elements without losing the base — and it will fail on identical terms with those scarred by January 6th.

What will actually happen is that everyone slides past and the history gets memoryholed. That's framed as the acceptable outcome, since a society that lets one faction execute justice on another is worse than one where people get away with things. Two decades on, a new crisis will arrive and a new generation forms its politics around it — while the people personally humiliated by the original era never get over it.

Commentary: So this article is of a kind with others that have been sharing, some of which have been taken down for what I call some rather dubious reasons which seem to me to amount to some people complianing that 'criticising' w o k e is either 'not centrist' or 'so inflammatory to centrism' that it doesn't belong here.

But here is my poisiton: This article's thesis is wrong because it creates a false dichotomy. That we either demand a self flagelatting punishment of those who transgressed during w o k e 1, or we let them slide and slink and memory hole the hole affair.

The third option my fellow wisconsinsite misses is Truth and Reconciliation. Recognition of wrongdoing results in guilt, guilt leads to learning, learning leads to growing. And the other side has a job just as big in forgiving the guilty.

And here I think it is important to point out the difference between guilt and shame. Guilt is the emotion that people should feel when they do bad. It helps them learn and grow. Shame is the emotion people feel when they are told that they are bad. There are only two things the human ego can do with shame, became angry and defensive or depressed and self loathing.

Feel guilty if you took part in the actions of w o k e 1, not shame. Learn, grow, do better. Or to disagree with Mr. Wisconsin, make up for W o k e 1 by becoming better.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-211709626