"Am I Getting Through To You, Mr. Beale?"

Reporter: Did the bond market persuade you to reverse?

Trump: I was watching the bond market. It's very tricky. If you look at it now it's beautiful. The bond market right now is beautiful. But I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy. pic.twitter.com/1WIpOsG8y2

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 9, 2025

“Queasy"?

What happened in the bond market overnight, the spike in yields on the 30-year and the 10-year bond, which showed that people were dumping our bonds," he noted. "And from what I understand, this is what forced the hand of this 90-day reprieve now."

"It's the bond market and the sort of lending markets that's the plumbing of the economy and those markets were imploding last night and that's why we have a 90-day freeze."

It wasn’t people getting queasy. It was a person.  Somebody told him he was meddling with primal forces:

He sure sounds like it:

"So I consider, I think in financial markets, because they've changed, look how much it changed today," he added. "We went from, you know, pretty moderate today, but over the last few days it looked pretty glum, to, I guess they say it was the biggest day in financial history. That's a pretty big change."

Nobody said that.

The Dow is still down over 3000 points from when Donald Trump took office.

So. Much. Winning.

🙄

— Art Candee 🍿🥤 (@ArtCandee) April 9, 2025

Bond markets are definitely not a language I speak, so I’ll let JMM put it plain terms:

The one additional thing to mention is why this happened. Every sign is that it was not about the equities markets but rather the bond market, where the demand for US Treasury bonds seemed to be softening as the global economy moved into crisis. That defies all the rules of the 21st century global economy. It means either something very, very bad or something armageddonly bad. The first is that banks and hedge funds and other big financial muckety-mucks were under so much cash-crunch stress that they were forced to liquidate Treasuries at any price. That points to a real danger of being on the precipice of a 2008-style financial crisis, albeit with very different drivers. The other possibility was that global buyers were losing the confidence in US Treasury debt itself which is basically the sheet anchor of the modern global economy. Take that away and things get much worse for the United States and our global primacy starts to evaporate.

I’ve seen the 2008 financial crisis used as the benchmark for “bad.” I’m pretty sure that would be good compared to the darker scenarios involving a collapsing bond market.

Primal forces, indeed. Will Trump try again in 90 days? The real question is: how long will the lesson of the bonds last?

I guess that depends on how the bond market reacts to Trump; today, and tomorrow; and tomorrow; and….