The bond market plays its winning hand

From Washington Post:
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Opinion David Von Drehle
The bond market plays its winning hand
Traders worldwide calmly assess Trump’s tariff tornado as weakness in
the U.S. economy.
April 11, 2025 at 11:03 a.m. EDT
Exhaustion is a primary weapon in President Donald Trump’s political
arsenal. He will grind on a subject longer than ordinary humans can bear
to listen — and thus appears to win arguments simply by sticking to them
long past tolerance. His cunning remora, provocateur Stephen K. Bannon,
summed up the strategy in a quotable scatological burst: Trump “floods
the zone with shit.” ...
But there exists a voting bloc that never tires, never flags. Operating
across continents and centuries, traders of government bonds have peered
narrowly at the performance of world leaders and registered judgment in
cool percentages. ...
What makes the bond market such a sharp-edged voting bloc is that all
participants are aligned in their goals, regardless of spin doctors and
hype merchants. They want to maximize profit while minimizing risk — two
sliding scales that allow for plenty of economic competition. Everyone
is asking, always: Is the borrowing entity getting stronger or weaker?
Are its prospects waxing or waning over time? Am I more likely or less
to be paid back in full?
Which brings us back to Trump’s capitulation. Trump and his team tried
to happy-talk their way past the stock market collapse, but the tireless
voters weighed in. His attempt to brush off his defeat in the bond
markets by saying that traders had gotten “yippy” fell flat.
And the pillar of this infrastructure is the credibility of the United
States.
Trump lost the tireless voters of the bond market. His vague retreat
only deepened their doubts. The world’s most powerful voting bloc
appears to be onto his game.
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Best rhetorical piece on bond trading, an activity highly dependent on a
segment of financial mathematics used to quantify largely risk of known
unknowns.