US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he was ready to intervene even more aggressively in markets after bond yields erased a relief rally, with the Treasury scrambling to reassure investors less than 24 hours after doubling the size of its debt buybacks. The spectacle was familiar: public power stepping in to steady the financial system it serves, while ordinary people are left to absorb the costs of war spending, borrowing, and the next round of fiscal discipline.
Long-term US Treasury yields climbed back above where they stood before Wednesday's buyback announcement, wiping out the brief relief that move had delivered. The 10-year and 30-year notes reversed Wednesday's declines and moved higher than before the announcement, forcing the Treasury to keep talking up its own market support. At the time of writing, the 30-year yield was trading at 5.25% after hitting a high of 5.33% on Tuesday, and the 10-year yield was at 4.7% after topping 4.75% on the same day.
The State's Toolkit for the Market
Bessent said, "We routinely do buybacks, and we're going to increase the size of the buyback [...] I would note that it could be more than the $4 billion per issue," and added, "Part of it is signalling here, and to show that we believe that the yields don't reflect the underlying fundamentals. This Iran conflict, we will get on the other side of this [...] we don't know when." The language was blunt enough. The Treasury wasn't pretending to solve anything. It was signalling confidence to a market that had already shown how quickly it can turn on the state when the numbers wobble.
He said weak liquidity at the 30-year point was the source of the strain and stopped short of committing to a figure, saying the Treasury would keep watching how conditions developed. "All we're trying to do is get people to focus on the fundamentals and not trade the headlines during a quiet period in a thin market," he said. In other words, the machinery of state finance wants calm, patience, and obedience from the market it props up, even as the same state keeps feeding the conditions that make borrowing more expensive.
Bessent also previewed a further announcement. "We are announcing probably at the end of this week, beginning of next week an increased focus on fiscal consolidation [...] and it's coming from President Trump [...] we will be examining both on the revenue side and the cost side [...] what we can do," he said, adding that the US Treasury had "a big toolkit" beyond buybacks alone. The phrase sounds technocratic. It means more pressure, more accounting, more management from above.
War Spending, Borrowing, and the Bill Below
The report said US public spending, and consequently government borrowing, had surged this year because of the Iran war and other policy decisions, despite US President Donald Trump’s vow to stabilise America’s finances. That’s the real balance sheet. War on one side, debt on the other, and the Treasury trying to convince markets that the state can still command cheap money while it funds its own crises.
Reacting to the US national debt crossing a record $40 trillion (€34.4tn), Bessent said that "there's nothing magic about the $40 trillion number [...] we can grow our way out of that." He also blamed the previous administration, saying the US had the highest deficit-to-GDP ratio in history under Biden while the Trump administration lowered it by a percentage point last year. The ritual blame game changes nothing about the structure: one administration after another borrows, spends, and then asks the market to believe in discipline.
Not everyone was reassured. Krishna Guha at Evercore ISI dismissed the plan as "a weak form of Operation Twist" that risks backfiring if it is read as a sign Washington is struggling to fund itself cheaply, and said Bessent's appearance itself had barely moved the bond market. JPMorgan's Maia Crook said the intervention "belies the underlying structural challenges and does nothing to address them," and warned it risked a lasting cost of its own: a US Treasury seen abandoning its long-standing pledge of steady, predictable debt issuance in favour of ad hoc market management.
That last line matters. The state wants predictability for capital, but only on its own terms. When the bond market shakes, the Treasury reaches for bigger buybacks, more signalling, and a "big toolkit." When the bill comes due, the language turns to consolidation. The people who never get a seat at this table are the ones who pay for the debt, the war, and the management of both.