Flash: Bessent’s Attempt to Jawbone the Treasury Market Will Fail

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Jim Loscalzo/Press Pool

Over the course of the Iran war, the Trump administration has learned it can trigger big declines in the price of oil with well-timed messages predicting imminent peace deals. Now, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is trying the same trick with the bond market.

The U.S. Treasury said this morning it would at least double repurchases of longer-dated Treasury bonds.

But the size of the planned repurchases is miniscule, doubling from $2 billion to $4 billion per operation. In July alone, the Federal budget deficit was $432 billion.

Read the entire article in The Wall Street Journal

Column of the Day

Taxes in Connecticut Can’t Be Cut If Personnel Costs Can’t Be Cut

By Chris Powell, former newspaper managing editor, June 13, 2026 - Post on June 29, 2026

Taxes in Connecticut Can’t Be Cut If Personnel Costs Can’t Be Cut

For the second straight year hundreds of people in Bloomfield are sore that while their side prevailed overwhelmingly in a referendum on the town budget (according to the Hartford Courant, the vote was 1,959 against the budget to 305 for it), the budget again has been deemed approved, this time with a 3% tax increase. Some property owners will end up facing a tax increase approaching 11% because the town is still implementing updated property valuations, which have soared with inflation.

June 13, 2026

Bloomfield Mayor Anthony Harrington told the Courant... that the budget was a lean as it could be...and asked “Where would the budget reductions come from?"

Yes, Bloomfield’s budget could have been reduced. For the biggest single expense in government in Connecticut is personnel, and with laws requiring unionization of state and municipal government employees, binding arbitration of their union contracts... state government has essentially put the costs of government personnel beyond economizing.

All together these laws result in compensation for government employees that is far more generous than what is received by private-sector employees in comparable jobs. That is what state and municipal elected and budget officials are hinting at when they shrug and say their budgeting options are limited by “fixed costs.”

The solution is obvious but always unspoken: To freeze or reduce taxes, you have to unfix the “fixed costs.”

Those costs weren’t fixed by God but by legislators and governors who long have been subservient to a particular special interest — a special interest that has come to control an entire political party, a special interest that the other major party is usually too timid to challenge.

● Read in CT Examiner
● Read here on The Red Line

Netanyahu Has Lost Middle America

By William A. Galston, Wall St Journal - June 8, 2026 - Post on June 20, 2026

Netanyahu Has Lost Middle America

Whatever the long-term military consequences of the war in Gaza, its effect on the American public’s support for Israel has been catastrophic and won’t be reversed quickly.

June 9, 2026

For the first time since Gallup began measuring attitudes on this matter a quarter-century ago, more Americans sympathize with the Palestinians than with the Israelis.

The decline isn’t limited to young Americans, who favor the Palestinians by 53% to 23%. The shift among 35- to 54-year-olds has been even sharper.

● Read in The Wall Street Journal
● Read here on The Red Line