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 over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Economist Podcasts · Slip the surly bonds? Scott Bessent goes on a yield trip · 26 Aug 2026 podcast

Well, I would say speaking to bond traders and bond investors over the past few days, maybe the dominant feeling is one of kind of puzzlement.

Nobody's quite sure what he's doing.

As I say, the intervention is too small to really move things on its own.

So you have to take this as a symbol.

So he does have tools to bring down government borrowing costs by more than this if he wants to use them, but they're pretty extreme.

They're no

As financial repression.

They're measures like forcing banks to hold more government debt, forcing domestic savers to hold more government debt, putting on capital controls so that savers can't invest overseas.

They have to invest in US assets, which tends to mean government debt.

Now, these are pretty extreme measures.

We have seen them before in the second half of the 20th century to bring down America's war debt.

But at the moment, I should stress that these measures are

Fanciful.

Nobody has said the government is going to do this.

But if you can't believe that the intervention he's made on his own is going to make much of a difference, you have to start thinking what kind of signal is he sending?

Is there more that he might do in the future?

Now, there's actually also a more cynical way to view this, which is Donald Trump, Scott Bessant's boss, has repeatedly said that he wants government borrowing costs to come down.

Bess

Has now gone into the market and done something that is guaranteed to generate headlines and has been generating headlines for the past week.

So whether it works or not, he can now tell his boss, Look, I've been doing something to bring down government borrowing costs, that's what you wanted.

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