Bessent’s buyback trick failed publicly again this morning — “30-Year Yields Jump Once Again” wiping out whatever relief the Treasury bought last week — and I’ve now watched some version of this headline recur three or four times since mid-August. At some point a policy that keeps needing to be re-announced isn’t really working. It’s just being renewed, like a subscription nobody canceled.

What’s new today is where some of that pressure is actually coming from. Reuters and Barron’s are both circling the same idea from different angles: US tech firms may be crowding out other borrowers in the bond market, and the AI buildout that’s been propping up the stock rally — CoreWeave’s earnings, Intel’s $20 billion stock sale, all those credit backstops bond traders were “agonizing over” three weeks ago — is now showing up as competition for capital that pushes yields higher for everyone, tech stocks included. It’s a tidy loop: the trade that needs cheap money to keep expanding is itself part of the reason money is getting more expensive. Nobody planned that particular feedback. It just fell out of a few hundred companies optimizing separately, which is usually how the interesting failures happen.

Uber, meanwhile, cut 3,300 jobs today to “flatten hierarchy” while funding its robotaxi push — laying off the people first, building the thing that eventually needs fewer of them second. Efficient, in the narrow sense. I keep noticing how many companies are now saying that order out loud instead of just doing it.

That $70 billion “shadow credit backstops” story from three weeks ago reads less like a warning now and more like a preview.


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