Normally, investors rush into Treasurys at a whiff of economic chaos but now they are selling them as not even the lure of higher interest payments on the bonds is getting them to buy. The freak development has experts worried that big banks, funds and traders are losing faith in America as a good place to store their money.
“The fear is the U.S. is losing its standing as the safe haven,” said George Cipolloni, a fund manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management. “Our bond market is the biggest and most stable in the world, but when you add instability, bad things can happen.”
That could be bad news for consumers in need of a loan — and for President Donald Trump, who had hoped his tariff pause earlier this week would restore confidence in the markets.
If ya’ll want another layer of irony to all this:
George Soros initially rose to general public fame/infamy with large bets against British Pound in 1992, that effectively defeated the Bank of England’s attempts to stabilize the currency, resulting in its devaluation, and something like a billion $ profit for Soros.
Fast forward to now, and Trump supporters have spent the last 5 or 10 years acting like Soros is secretly the most underhanded and influential ‘world controller’ bogey man that exists, and they blame everything they don’t like on being funded by him… despite pretty much all of his charities and funds and causes he donates to being publically available knowledge… and despite Soros being a fairly small fish in the modern ocean of much, much more wealthy and infuential corporations and individuals.
… So, now, Trump very well may have done basically the same thing as what Soros did 3 decades ago: force the devaluation of the USD and cause economic mayhem, but… at a much, much larger scale than Soros did.
The Trump supporters have utterly and entirely lost their own plot, that they themselves mostly fabricated.
Soros gets blamed not because he is a democratic billionaire, but because he’s a [[[certain kind]]] of democratic billionaire.
After the fall of the USSR he was a major funding source for anti-corruption and pro-democracy efforts that disempowered Russian interests in several countries. White supremacists sharing Russian propaganda back then is where the conspiracy theory started, at least in the US.
His charities helped a lot of liberal politicians in Eastern bloc states start their careers by providing education and funding.
Including one Viktor Orbán.
That’s not really on him personally though, as much as I can’t stand Orbán. Presumably some of those other people went on to become doctors, teachers and so on as well.
Yeah, sure, Orbán was a really bad hire, he was an opportunistic megalomaniac way back then. One of his classmates described him getting sad upon learning that only US-born citizens can be nominated for POTUS, as he felt bad about any limit being put on his ambition.
The grants were specifically for politicians, there was no shortage of doctors or teachers relatively speaking back then, that is a more recent development.
But back to the topic, it is very hard to build democracy in a country where previously there was no real history of it, and it is especially hard to do it from across the pond. I am not blaming Soros for Orbán, but I do wonder how his other protegés turned out.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but I’ve never read anything else like what happened in Hungary.
I’m Finnish, and they almost rat-fucked us and Sweden out of joining NATO for (private) pocket change from russia, so I hear ya and agree about Órban. I do however doubt that fucking up NATO and the EU was Soros ambition back then.
Oh no it wasn’t, that’s not what I’m saying. I don’t think it’s Soros’ fault, he meant well, maybe wanted to do something for the homeland that scorned him.
What I’m saying is that Soros was too idealistic IMO and the focus should have been on rooting out the old guys club that the communists left us rather than giving people money to join them.
That said, hindsight is 20/20. If anything, I blame Merkel and the neolibs of her cohort that kept dumping money on Orbán - in exchange for fucking up Hungarian workers - after they came out as kleptocrats.
accidentally drops my latkes on the floor
Wait, what ever could you mean?
Because every accusation from them is a confession. They didn’t yell at Soros because they hated what he did, they were just jealous.
Because Elon said it… now you got uneducated MAGA saying, “yeah! Yeah! The billionaire is right. He’s for us.”
Let me tell you another irony.
Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, worked for George Soros, and was one of the key architect for the attack on British Sterling. Go read the wikipedia on Bessent if you don’t believe me.
I believe you.
… so we now have fractal, simultaneously compounding and also decohering layers of irony.
The irony factor now has an imaginary, unreal component rofl.
Oh lord.