Joshua Roberts
speaker
181 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 26 Aug
Joshua Roberts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Government borrowing costs have been climbing across most of the rich world for quite a long time, but in recent weeks they've flirted with or exceeded their highest levels since the financial crisis twenty years ago.
Now, the American bond market in particular is perhaps the most important market in the world.
So when there are jitters there and rising yields mean there are jitters, everybody else starts to worry.
Yeah, so there's a few different effects going on here at once.
Probably the biggest one is the sheer amount that America's government is borrowing every year.
This fiscal year it's set to top two trillion dollars.
That doesn't make America unique.
That's also one of the reasons that other rich world governments' borrowing costs are rising.
But another reason you have is that inflation is rising as a result in part of the war in Iran.
That's shot up oil prices and fertilizer prices.
It's feeding through to higher consumer prices.
When inflation goes up, bonds become worthless.
So this is another factor that's driven up government borrowing costs.
And just generally uncertainty about what the government's next move is going to be.
Now, in a way, Scott Bessant, the US Treasury Secretary, has now added to that uncertainty by this quite weird.
weird intervention seemingly designed to bring government borrowing costs down.
It's a bit of a mystery what he's trying to do, because on the one hand, he's gone in and said, I, the US Treasury Secretary, am going to buy back a few billion dollars worth of long-term US government debt.
And that seems like it's an attempt to bring down borrowing costs.
When somebody buys a bond, the price goes up.
Something to know about bonds, prices and yields move inversely.
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