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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

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

Yeah, we are really getting the politicization of these really important institutions.

And the struggle here is that they're being tugged in different directions.

Inflation has gone up.

More likely than not, as a result, the Fed is going to need to tighten monetary conditions.

It's going to need to raise rates, maybe not a lot, but it's certainly not going to want to lower them at the moment.

On the other hand, we've got the Treasury acting to try and bring down long-term yields, which is the same, basically, or similar to lowering interest rates.

So you've got pressure on these two institutions pulling.

In different directions.

Now, I should say the Fed has an awful lot more firepower than the Treasury does.

If the Fed wants to go out and buy government bonds to bring yields down, it can spend hundreds of billions of dollars because after all that it's the Fed that issues the currency in the first place.

The Treasury only really has the balance sheet at the moment to spend two, four billion dollars buying bonds back.

So in a true tussle, it would be probably

The Fed that wins.

The thing that changes that is if they're both acting under the influence of the president and doing what he wants rather than what would actually fulfil their mandates, in the Fed's case, keeping inflation under control, then who knows what happens next.

And all of that tension is really going to be under focus at Jackson Hole, the central banking conference that begins on Thursday.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

Economist Podcasts · Cockroaches 1, Modi 0: India’s remarkable protests · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

This is a copy of the Financial Times.

Now, obviously, the headlines tell me news that's already happened.

But imagine if instead they were telling me tomorrow's news.

And I'm a trader.

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