Ohkay, so Stanley Druckenmiller was out dunking on (drucken on, amirite) Bessent and his Treasury shenanigans yesterday (here's the WSJ archival link).

The FT Alphaville take(-down!) was much funnier, so we'll go with that instead.

Wigglesworth's observation, that both Kevin Warsh and Bessent are great fans of Stan and considers him a macro legend, makes Druckenmiller's critique of Bessent's Treasury management all the more painful.

oh, smooth. Yeah, the problem isn't some irrelevant, tangential Treasury composition: it's that the federal government is running a ~2trn deficit. Duh. No shenanigans or finicky dealing is gonna fix that problem.

"Bessent’s mounting attempts at taming the bond market have gone from odd to incoherent to desperate."

Remember, every dollar of debt that the US Treasury buys back is financed by a dollar of debt. It’s mostly just exchanging a long-duration liability for a shorter-duration liability — a kind of pissant Operation Twist, only this time without the Fed’s ability to create an infinite amount of dollars.

PLUS, credible commitment story:

remember, about $1tn of Treasuries trade A DAY, and that’s just the cash market. This is why Treasuries sold off again after the initial shock of the Treasury announcement. As Bessent should remember from his private sector days, making incredible commitments erodes your credibility, and markets are pretty good at sniffing that out.

Seemingly aware of market scepticism, Treasury officials on Monday suggested that Bessent could also use the almost $1tn sitting in the “Treasury General Account”.

Lol, that doesn't fix anything. Like trying to stop the bank from foreclosing on your underwater mortgage by spending what's in your bank account destined for bills at the end of the month. That's gonna end well!

most of that money is going to concrete things, like running the US government, or there as a backup in case of a catastrophic market breakdown. It’s not idle financial firepower sitting there for Treasury secretaries that want to try their hand at bond trading again.

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