I want to bring up a clip of Bessent from the other day on CNBC.

Archival clip of CNBC:

Sara Eisen: Yeah. I was going to ask how big this could get. If the signal here is that you’re not happy with the direction of yields, they’ve gone back the other way.

We’ve erased most of the Treasury rally that you got yesterday with that big surprise. So how much more are you willing to do?

Bessent: Well, again, we have a big tool kit, so we’ll see. Part of it is signaling here and to show that we believe that the yields don’t reflect the underlying fundamentals.

This Iran conflict, we will get on the other side of this. We don’t know when, and we can talk about the economic measures we’re going to be taking against Iran in a minute.

And we, in the administration, are announcing, probably at the end of this week or beginning of next week, an increased focus on fiscal consolidation.

It’s coming from President Trump. Russ Vogt and myself will be examining both on the revenue side and the cost side what we can do.

I want to go through a couple pieces of that. Because one thing you hear there is something I was mentioning a few minutes ago, which is at least beginning to signal they would like to do fiscal consolidation. But given how little they’ve done with Congress, I don’t think anybody is taking that seriously at all.

But what does he mean when he says: We don’t believe the yields reflect the underlying fundamentals?

It reminds me a little bit of the John McCain quote that was very famous when the markets were collapsing.

Archival clip of John McCain: The fundamentals of our economy are strong.

That quote did not age well. What do you hear when Bessent says that?

Truthfully, I hear a little bit of desperation. I don’t think bond yields are going to go massively higher. This is not a massive crisis, but the rolling out of an enlarged buyback program, a technical program — very nerdy — it’s not supposed to be something that has a major effect

So when the U.S. government sells a 10-year bond, for example, which is the standard type of bond, that’s super-tradable. It’s supereasy. You can sell a billion dollars of it without moving the price.