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
So when the price goes up, the borrowing cost comes down.
So you can see that as what he's attempting to do.
The reason it's weird is because the size of intervention he's made is tiny compared with the bond market.
He said, on each of a few dates, I'm going to buy back $2 billion more worth of long-term bonds.
But over the course of a year, the US Treasury issues $2 trillion worth of bonds.
So it's quite
Quite hard to see this intervention actually kind of really putting a thumb on the scale and moving government borrowing costs.
What indeed we saw the day after he announced this was long-term yields fell a little bit the next day, but then they came right back up and recovered to where they were.
So
If you can't quite believe that his intervention is going to have much of an impact on its own, it's more about the symbolism, the signal that the US Treasury Secretary is now willing to step into the bond market and try to force yields down.
Yeah, and it's particularly unusual from a secretary like Scott Bessant, who formerly was a hedge fund manager, who made his career from betting against governments that tried to unsuccessfully intervene in their own markets.
So for example, Scott Bessant was one of the people who broke the Bank of England in nineteen ninety two when it was trying to sustain an unsustainable exchange rate peg.
What he's now doing
Looks a little bit like those failed interventions of the past that he, above all people, should know don't work.
The government can't really step in and fix the price of its borrowing.
As you say, this is also something that more usually is the preserve of central bankers.
And when the Fed steps in to lower long-term government borrowing costs by things like quantitative easing, they're not really aiming to keep.
the government borrowing cost under control.
They're aiming to use that as a tool to stimulate markets in other ways.
When you have the Treasury Secretary stepping in and explicitly trying to bring government borrowing costs down, that's actually the sort of thing that makes investors panic a little bit rather than feeling better about lending money to the government.
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