this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
256 points (98.9% liked)

News

28917 readers
2 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Normally, investors rush into Treasurys at a whiff of economic chaos but now they are selling them as not even the lure of higher interest payments on the bonds is getting them to buy. The freak development has experts worried that big banks, funds and traders are losing faith in America as a good place to store their money.

“The fear is the U.S. is losing its standing as the safe haven,” said George Cipolloni, a fund manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management. “Our bond market is the biggest and most stable in the world, but when you add instability, bad things can happen.”

That could be bad news for consumers in need of a loan — and for President Donald Trump, who had hoped his tariff pause earlier this week would restore confidence in the markets.

all 47 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 99 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

This is arguably bigger news than the stock market.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

It definitely is. If bonds don't sell, or at least no longer sell cheap, then the US might get bigger problems with their budget.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago

republicunts plans to finance rich people tax cuts with additional debt in shambles

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago

If US Bonds are no longer the de facto safe haven asset...

The USD is no longer the world's de facto reserve currency.

That means that even if all the tariffs were rescinded, Trump croaked and somehow JD Vance took a 'be at least somewhat more competent and less stupid' pill, and never reinstated them...

Well it would mean the dollar would crash against other currencies, we wouldn't be able to import anywhere near as much, and US international debt payments as a percentage of the yearly budget would climb fast.

... And then that could spiral into both massive austerity at home, and/or 'lol we are defaulting on our international debt' either by formal declaration, or... basically hyperinflation.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Bond sales are only politically connected to the budget; not financially. Not selling bonds would in no way hinder congress from passing a budget.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm no expert but it seems to me if the yields have to go up to get buyers, it's like raising the interest rates on a loan. You can still get the loan but you have to buy less car/house if you want to afford the payments.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

You're mostly right.

Most T Bills and Bonds... they don't work like a credit card or a home loan.

Those are things you pay a bit on every month, and the interest rate is an APR, which means Annualized Percentage Rate, which means the monthly interest rate you are paying is the APR divided by 12.

So with those, the bank gets money every month untill you pay it all off.

With Bonds... say a 5 year Bond... you pay for the Bond, newly issued by the US govt, and 5 years later, you hand it back to them, and they pay you the face value + interest rate.

But, people who have already bought a bond, well they can sell it again, before it matures, to... some other guy, some other country, some other firm.

Thats called the 'secondary market', and most of the time you hear a news story about bond prices and yields, its a second party selling a bond to a third party.

Generally, when the US does an issuance auction of new debt directly... well, it has to generally track the prices and yields set by the various secondary markets, sorta like how you'd wanna check a car salesman's price against kelly blue book to make sure you're getting a reasonable deal.

There were moments in thr GFC, 07 08 09, where US debt auctions ... didn't actually result in the amount of bonds expected to sell, actually selling, because there were enough potential bond buyers who assessed that the US was offering unreasonable prices and yields, given the economic turmoil.

... I am not an 'expert' either, but I do actually have a BSc in Econ, and I apparently remember a good deal of my courses, and enjoy infodumping lol.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

The prices and yields of bonds have an inverse relationship:

If price goes down, yield goes up.

The yield is also known as the interest rate.

This interest rate * the purchase price is paid by the US government to the bondholder at the end of the duration of its term.

When you look at the US Federal budget, and see the amount that goes toward making debt payments...

This, bonds, are a very big part of what you are looking at.

If the interest rate on US debt instruments are going up... that means more and more of the budget has to be allocated toward debt repayment.

While yes, extremely directly, bond yields rising doesn't... mechanically make the passing of a budget impossible in some kind of procedural way...

It very much makes the stakes higher as now our growing debt problem is growing even faster.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago

Waaaay biger news

Can't fund that big bad military when all those dollars go the pay off those bonds.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago

I sold some bonds 3 days ago. I just don't trust this administration won't default on something in the next 6 months. Or do something else to drop out AAA rating.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Preventing this was originally what people thought was causing him to pause

[–] [email protected] 70 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I guess I picked a bad time to stop huffing glue.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Can you fly this economy and land it?

[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Have you ever been to an El Salvadorian prison, Joey?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Joey, do you like it when JD Vance rubs up and down on your leg?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Johnny what can you make of this?

[–] [email protected] 58 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Oh come on, "Freak" sell off makes it sound like there's some mystery as to what caused this when it's blindingly obvious what the problem is here. The markets, and far more importantly all decent and rational people throughout the world, won't and shouldn't have any confidence in anything as long as Donald Trump is president. The only thing that starts to fix this mess is his resignation or impeachment (and that is only a start, investigations criminal charges and sentences amendments to laws etc. all need to happen too).

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago

Not happening, so I’d plan accordingly.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

The only thing that starts to fix this mess is his resignation or impeachment (and that is only a start, investigations criminal charges and sentences amendments to laws etc. all need to happen too).

Or removal by other means.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

It's not really a "freak" event when the causes are blatantly clear and self-inflicted.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago

Just because we have chiselled abs and stunning features, it doesn't mean that we too can't not die in a freak gasoline fight accident.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I am very annoyed that this use of 'freak' and further corruption of the term 'black swan event' have just gotten completely common place.

A black swan event is supoosed to be something completely impossible to have been predicted before hand because you didn't have enough knowledge to even understand there was a kind of risk you were not accounting for.

An 'unknown unknown', to use the only useful idea Donald Rumsfeld ever came up with.

... This bond sell off is utterly predictable, unless you are completely brainwashed into a delusional level of normalcy bias and complacency.

All you have to do is realize the US is acting like an unstable dictatorship... which it very obviously is... and this is an easily predictable outcome for anyone with a decent knowledge of macroecon theory/history.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 weeks ago

"The fear is the U.S. is loosing its standing as the safe heaven" ? Looking at it from the E.U., it's already gone with no going back. The U.S. looks more and more like a self destructing failed state, that only needed a little nudge from foreign troll factories.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 weeks ago

There’s a reason for that. Maybe if all those well-off bankers hadn’t thrown in with trump in hopes of deregulation their portfolios would still be slowly climbing up with the DJIA under a democrat instead of flopping around like a fish out of water under trump.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

If ya'll want another layer of irony to all this:

George Soros initially rose to general public fame/infamy with large bets against British Pound in 1992, that effectively defeated the Bank of England's attempts to stabilize the currency, resulting in its devaluation, and something like a billion $ profit for Soros.

Fast forward to now, and Trump supporters have spent the last 5 or 10 years acting like Soros is secretly the most underhanded and influential 'world controller' bogey man that exists, and they blame everything they don't like on being funded by him... despite pretty much all of his charities and funds and causes he donates to being publically available knowledge... and despite Soros being a fairly small fish in the modern ocean of much, much more wealthy and infuential corporations and individuals.

... So, now, Trump very well may have done basically the same thing as what Soros did 3 decades ago: force the devaluation of the USD and cause economic mayhem, but... at a much, much larger scale than Soros did.

The Trump supporters have utterly and entirely lost their own plot, that they themselves mostly fabricated.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Soros gets blamed not because he is a democratic billionaire, but because he's a [[[certain kind]]] of democratic billionaire.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

After the fall of the USSR he was a major funding source for anti-corruption and pro-democracy efforts that disempowered Russian interests in several countries. White supremacists sharing Russian propaganda back then is where the conspiracy theory started, at least in the US.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

His charities helped a lot of liberal politicians in Eastern bloc states start their careers by providing education and funding.

Including one Viktor Orbán.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

accidentally drops my latkes on the floor

Wait, what ever could you mean?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Because every accusation from them is a confession. They didn't yell at Soros because they hated what he did, they were just jealous.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

How's the market for booze, bullets, and bread going?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Don't know about booze, bullets and bread, but there does seem to be alot of folks taking up smoking again. Altria stock has shot up like a rocket over the last 12 months.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Huh. I don't know anything about Altria. Wonder if they're capitalizing on nicotine packets and vapes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

They are, among every thing else tobacco related.

They are, to the tobacco industry, what TTI is to power tools. Among the companies they own are Philip Morris (Cigarettes, Cigars and pipe tobacco), US Smokeless (dip, snuff and whatnot), and NJOY (vaping).

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Ya think? This is the end of American Hegemony.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

All it took was electing one spoiled rich asshole with an inferiority complex.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

But he didn’t happen by accident, he’s the result of mind-numbing, stubborn, continuous anti-intellectualism people have reveled in in their idiotic decadence for years now.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

There's a story floating around that Canada's PM, Mark Carney, may have initiated this threat so that Trump would back off on his tariff escalation.

https://lemmy.world/post/28074536

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

Dude is an absolute genius to go this route and the perfect person to be Trump's foil.

If Canada doesn't elect him, they are bigger fools than us Americans. The dude just chilli-whipped us.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

I saw this synopsis a little bit ago and I thought it was a pretty good short description

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago

Can't believe the president who has repeatedly floated the idea of defaulting on government debt to save money would provoke this response.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Desperation is unlikely to produce meaningful improvements

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Art of the Deal, ladies and gentlemen! You just don’t understand!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Well I mean... Gestures at everything