re: US Treasury is doubling down on buybacks to try to supress the yield

From Claude, for anyone else with a notional understanding of this:

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Bottom line: the Treasury is using an existing, routine tool (debt buybacks) at an unusually large scale to counter a rapid, disruptive rise in long-term borrowing costs. It worked immediately to pull yields down and calm markets, but most independent analysts frame it as a short-term stabilizer — it doesn't address the deeper drivers (inflation expectations, energy prices, heavy debt issuance, competition from AI-related corporate borrowing) that pushed yields to multi-decade highs in the first place. Worth watching for updates at the November 4 Quarterly Refunding, when Treasury says it'll clarify whether this becomes a more permanent policy shift.

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The big problem is the lead weight on US fiscal policy are the commitments they have in social welfare and entitlements to the most important voting demographic in the country.

Half our budget is essentially going towards things that only the retirees class reap the benefits and our solutions have always been to under-fund those programs - calling into question longterm viability - and cut everything else that isn't military spending thus choking out investment in the working class (I do not mean by income, I mean not-retired) and those in training/education.

I don't understand this, but it sounds wild

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So he wants to put in place a system to prepare for this great problem, and what he’s told Japan is: don’t sell your securities. And by the way, Europe, Asia — don’t sell your bonds either. We’ll do what we just did with the Emirates a few weeks before we made the Japan deal — we’ll make a swap. Instead of selling your holdings of US bonds, deposit them with the Federal Reserve, we’ll make a swap agreement, we’ll give you, in exchange, an equivalent dollar amount of the bonds you put in. You can sell — swap — these dollars we’ve given you to support your exchange rate. If you want to dissipate your money and make arbitrageurs rich by helping your currency go up for a few days, maybe a week, spend a hundred billion dollars, you lose it — but we’ll lend you the money to dissipate away, and we’re still holding your bonds. We’re happy to have you do that, so you don’t have to either sell your securities or raise your interest rates.

Because if you raise interest rates — and Japan’s interest rates are already the highest they’ve been in 20 or 30 years, really since the 1990 crisis — then people ask, why would you want to borrow yen to take a risk buying US bonds? Because if you buy US bonds, and the interest rates US bonds are obliged to pay go higher and higher, their price — their exchange rate — goes down. So any holder of them, if you’re borrowing cheap yen to buy bonds thinking you’ll make an even bigger interest rate gain, well now the squeeze forces you to sell these bonds, but you get a much lower price for them, because when interest rates go up, the market price goes down. They’re being squeezed that way.

Bessent has told Japan: don’t get stuck in this, we’ll just do a swap, we’ll lend you the dollars. So what he’d like to see is the whole rest of the world swapping their bond holdings for US dollars, and in exchange, the United States will have enormous claims on countries whose currencies are going to plunge — the Japanese yen, the European currencies, other Asian currencies — which they can ultimately pay off and settle by making a huge capital gain buying foreign securities at a much lower rate. That’s the game. And other countries don’t seem to see how they’re being taken for a ride by Bessent’s policy. It’s not to help them — it’s to help the United States gain, and to prevent them from selling the bonds and causing higher interest rates here.

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LINK

But are we still years away from adequate inventory for the housing market?

I think we are headed for a major recession unfortunately


It’s almost a repeat

Efficiency in government is trimming around the edges.

The truth is that the retirees love their elderly care and social security check. Everybody else wants the same deal they’re getting AND they want the government to invest in things that improve this nations and its people today (not just for the golden years).

We either need to have a dramatic change in what people see as the contract between the government and its people OR we need to get real and 50 years of cutting taxes was a disastrous mistake and the people who mostly led that movement are going to be the bomb that blows the whole American system up.

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But it's not.

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sure thing

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k. Everybody else wants the same deal they’re getting

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Not me. Let me opt out of it and keep my own money to invest as I see fit. I will be more than fine. I'll even give up everything Ive put in to protect my kids from having to deal with our inability to make anything bettet.

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To be fair, I don't think anyone currently elected to federal office -nor even most of those running for federal office- want to address it as there's no win in doing so and speaking the problem out loud might clue in the general public to the true depth of the structural issues holding up our economy and currency.

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yes. What I said came out wrong - I did not mean this Administration alone won't do anything. They are all in on it. Just a few short years ago conservatives, including Bessent, were criticizing Yellen for doing similar things: flooding the market to hold down long-term yields and keep the pre-election housing market/economy moving along.
Essentially that is what is going on here.