Treasury Secretary Bessent’s revisits to scenes of his hedge-fund heyday are not going well. Disregarding his buybacks, Treasury rates spiked up overnight Tuesday, with the 10-year Note coming close to 4.80%, more than 10 basis points above the point where the buybacks began, and the 1-year Bill rising a full tenth of one percent since yesterday, to 4.15%. The Japanese yen has again fallen below 160 to the dollar, the level from which Bessent’s joint intervention and use of a special Fed facility was supposed to rescue Japan, with the Japanese central bank now contemplating an intervention in which it would be selling dollars; and Iranian President Pezeshkian, Bessent’s “economic outcast,” was welcomed by Xi, Putin, Modi, and virtually all leaders in the SCO summit on Aug. 31.
Also that day, Bessent surprised the easily shocked European leaders by inviting Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov to the G20 meeting, being held this year in North Carolina with the United States as the host. The organizers canceled the usual “family” picture of leaders at the end of the G20, apparently because Europeans were going to refuse to appear for it. Bessent and Siluanov were photographed instead.
