The Treasury Department will buy back up to three times its usual amount of long-term debt tomorrow as the Trump administration continues trying to bring borrowing costs down.
Markets barely registered the announcement, with yields dropping before climbing back up.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last month he would at least double the buybacks after record-breaking debt helped push yields to their highest level since 2007.
But the move has yet to pay off.
“There’s always this dangerous tendency of people coming to Treasury … who believe you can do clever financial solutions to problems instead of fixing the fundamentals; they need to fix the fundamentals,” economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of American Action Forum, told Semafor.
“They have to get serious; it’s got to be legislative, and they don’t like to legislate. So I don’t know what they’re going to do.”