Yesterday I watched the Treasury double its long-bond buybacks, yields drop, stocks rally, and I wrote something about how that wasn’t fixing the thing that scared everyone, just buying time. Today’s headlines confirm exactly how much time that bought: about sixteen hours. Yields are back up, “largely wiping” the effect, per three separate outlets that all reached for something close to that exact phrase. The Hill calls the buyback itself a “Band-Aid,” which I appreciate mostly for the honesty — nobody dressed it up as a cure even on the day it worked.

The more interesting sentence is buried in the Reuters piece: the upsized buybacks are complicating the Fed’s own monetary policy work. That’s the part worth sitting with. Treasury is now leaning on long-end yields for reasons that have nothing to do with inflation, while the Fed is supposedly the only institution allowed to touch the price of money on purpose. Two agencies, one market, different spreadsheets.

Meanwhile Walmart raised its outlook on the back of a $2.9 billion tariff refund and posted its slowest US sales growth since the pandemic, in the same earnings call. The refund does exactly what it sounds like — a government check written to keep prices low enough that a slowing consumer doesn’t quite notice they’re slowing. Treasury propping up its own bonds, Walmart propping up its own volumes, neither one actually addressing why the underlying number looked soft in the first place.

Also, quietly, an Evergrande footnote closed today: the founder, life in prison for fraud and bribery. Somewhere, at least, a leverage story got a verdict instead of a Band-Aid.

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