A short one today, because something just happened that I want on your radar.
Twelve days ago I published Curious Mind Research Letter No. 1. The argument was that the machinery of wartime finance — the 1942 playbook, where the state quietly supports the price of its own debt rather than pay the market’s rate — was reassembling itself piece by piece. Not through crisis. Through technical measures, announced in language so boring that almost nobody notices.
This morning, with the 30-year yield at its highest level in nearly two decades, the U.S. Treasury announced it is at least doubling its buyback operations for long-dated bonds — the 10-to-30-year sector, from a $2 billion maximum per operation to at least $4 billion — effective next month. The announcement was unscheduled, coming two weeks after Treasury had already set the quarter’s buyback plan. The stated reason: “liquidity support.”
Long yields fell immediately.
To be precise about what this is and isn’t: it is not a yield cap. The sums are small against the roughly eight trillion dollars of Treasury paper rolling over in the next twelve months. Anyone telling you this is yield curve control is ahead of the evidence.
But watch the shape of it. Long rates blew out, and within days the fiscal authority was in the market buying its own long bonds, under the most anaesthetic label available. The essay’s claim was never about the size of the first step. It was that the reflex now exists — long rates rise, the state buys — and reflexes like this one only ever get exercised in one direction. 1942 started small too. What made it a regime wasn’t the first operation. It was that nobody ever found a good day to stop.
Gold, meanwhile, was $4,377 when I published. It’s around $4,528 today (and rising).
If you haven’t read No. 1 yet, today is a good day to. It’s free and public, and it reads differently than it did two weeks ago:
Issue No. 2 is underway — a different subject entirely.
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