Bonds sharply sold off and stocks tumbled Wednesday after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s latest effort to tamp down what he called market “fever” backfired.
At 11 a.m. ET, the Treasury Department announced that it would repurchase $6 billion worth of 10- to 20-year government bonds, in the hope that fewer bonds on the market would drive up demand, pushing down rates, or yields, that have soared to levels not seen in decades.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, most Treasury yields sharply jumped on the announcement. The 10-year bond yield surged to as high as 4.85%, its highest since November 2023. The 20- and 30-year bond yields surged to as high as 5.3%. When Treasuries fall, their yields rise.
By 4 p.m. ET, bond yields had pulled back slightly from the highest levels of the day but remained sharply elevated.
The Nasdaq Composite, which is sensitive to interest rates given how many major tech companies it tracks, ended the day down 0.6%. The S&P 500 tumbled 0.5%.
The reaction from Wall Street underscores the limits of the power Bessent claims to exert over markets. The Trump administration is running out of tools to gain leverage over major parts of the U.S. economy, from gas prices and bond yields to retaliatory tariffs.
Yields have been rising steadily since the start of the year. But they began to surge in late July, when President Donald Trump’s newly installed Federal Reserve chairman, Kevin Warsh, didn’t sound fully committed to using the Fed’s tools to help curb inflation at a news conference.
That spooked bond markets, which saw inflation climbing as the Iran war dragged on and Trump’s trade policies raised the prices of many imported goods.
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