解码债券市场风暴：从美债收益率飙升到普通人的经济账

Rachel Abrams: From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. For months now, you might have been following the headlines about the turbulence in the bond market. And by following, I mean you might have found yourself a little confused and maybe even kind of alarmed by all this talk of the dangers to our economy. Well, today, we are going to try to demystify the headlines for those of you who might need a little bit of help.

Rachel Abrams: Our artillery, Ben Casselman, chief economics correspondent for The New York Times, he is going to explain what's been happening and why it matters. It's Tuesday, September 15th.

Rachel Abrams: Okay, Ben, we have invited you on The Daily today to do the impossible, which is we are going to explain to people who may not understand how bonds work, what a bond is, and why the bond markets have been going haywire. And we are going to explain that not only so that you, dear listener, understands, but that you even enjoy this conversation.

Ben Casselman: Rachel, I love a challenge, but I confess that pretty much all day I was sitting here waiting for a message from you or somebody on the team being like, "You know what? We can't do it. Never mind. Too hard."

Rachel Abrams: Nope, we're going through with it. We are taping this episode, and my first question to you, Ben, is why should people care about the bond market?

Ben Casselman: Yeah, the bond market we talk about it less than the stock market, in part because it's confusing, and I'm going to do my best as we talk here to make it less confusing.

Rachel Abrams: You'll be great.

Ben Casselman: But in many ways, it is more important than the stock market. It's arguably the most important market on Earth. And your financial life is tied to the bond market whether or not you know it.

Rachel Abrams: Even if you don't even realize it.

Ben Casselman: Even if you don't even realize it. Even if you never made a decision to go invest in bonds, it's probably somewhere in your life. For one thing, because you've probably got some bonds somewhere in your retirement portfolio. If you've got a 401K, if you've got an IRA, chances are there are some bonds in there, so your wealth is tied up in it. But more broadly, interest rates, borrowing costs in our economy—your mortgage rate, your car loan, your student loan, credit cards, what big companies pay to borrow money—all of that is set by the bond market. So, if you want to borrow, or if the company you work for wants to borrow money to keep paying you, the bond market is at the center of it.

Rachel Abrams: You are going to make that less opaque for us. But before we do, I'm sure a lot of our listeners know what a stock is. So, to start us off on familiar ground, can you explain the difference between a stock and a bond?

Ben Casselman: Yeah. So, when you buy a stock, you're buying a little piece of ownership in a company. And if that company does great, you do great. If the company goes bust, your stock can be worth nothing. It's high risk, high reward. A bond is a loan, it's an IOU. Somebody is saying, "Lend me $100, and I will pay you some amount of interest every year, and at the end of some period of time, 10 years or whatever, I will give you back your $100."

Rachel Abrams: Which is why bonds are generally seen as a safer bet than stocks.

Ben Casselman: Exactly. Most of the time, yes, because you know what you're going to get. And that borrower could be Apple, it could be the state of New York borrowing money to build a bridge or a school. But when we talk about the bond market in the news, what we're usually talking about is the U.S. government, U.S. Treasuries—loans to the United States federal government.

Rachel Abrams: Okay, so these are government IOUs.

Ben Casselman: That's right. And about a trillion dollars worth of those IOUs change hands, get bought and sold in the market every single day.

Rachel Abrams: A trillion dollars every single day.

Ben Casselman: Every single day. It is the biggest pool of money anywhere in the world. And the absolute center of that universe is the 10-year Treasury bond.

Rachel Abrams: That is the thing that I have seen in headlines over and over again, the 10-year Treasury. Why is everyone so obsessed with this particular bond?

Ben Casselman: Because 10 years is this great middle ground. The government borrows for as short as a month, and as long as 30 years. But 10 years is kind of in the middle. And so it has become the benchmark. It is the measuring stick that everything else gets measured against. If you want to take out a mortgage, the bank looks at the 10-year Treasury and adds a little bit to it. If a company wants to borrow money, they look at the 10-year Treasury and add a little bit to it.

Rachel Abrams: It's the measuring stick.

Ben Casselman: That's right. And the yield on that 10-year Treasury has been going up.

Rachel Abrams: And yield is another word that I see everywhere in headlines. What does yield mean in plain English?

Ben Casselman: Yeah. So, yield is just the return that you get on your investment. But the crucial thing to understand about bonds is that price and yield move in opposite directions. They're on a seesaw. When prices go down, yields go up. When prices go up, yields go down.

Rachel Abrams: Why do they move in opposite directions?

Ben Casselman: Think of it this way. If I have a bond that pays $5 a year, and I bought it for $100, my return is 5%. But if nobody wants that bond and I have to sell it to you for $90, you're still getting that $5 every year, but you only paid $90 for it. So your return, your yield, is higher. You got a discount on the price, which makes your return better.

Rachel Abrams: Ah, okay. So when we hear that yields are going up, that means prices are going down. People are selling bonds.

Ben Casselman: Exactly right.

Rachel Abrams: So why are yields going up? Why are people selling bonds? Is there a nice simple one-sentence explanation?

Ben Casselman: If only. I would love to give you the simple one-sentence Schoolhouse Rock version. This is going to take more than a Schoolhouse Rock.

Rachel Abrams: Let's take it step by step. What's step one?

Ben Casselman: So, step one, at the barest minimum, is the Federal Reserve. Over the last year and a half, the Fed has been raising interest rates at the fastest pace in decades in order to fight inflation.

Rachel Abrams: And when the Fed raises interest rates, how does that affect the bond market?

Ben Casselman: If the Fed is paying you 5% to keep your money in a super safe short-term account, you're not going to be happy holding an old bond that only pays you 1.5% or 2%. You're going to sell that old bond to go get the new higher interest rate. And when everybody sells those old bonds, the prices drop, and the yields go up to match what the Fed is doing.

Rachel Abrams: That makes total sense: the Fed raises rates, bond yields go up. But why has there been so much panic recently?

Ben Casselman: Because the Fed is mostly done raising rates. Most people think the Fed is either at the end or very close to the end of its rate-hiking campaign. But over the last month or two, yields on long-term bonds have shot up even faster. Something else is driving this beyond just the immediate Fed rate hikes.

Rachel Abrams: So what is that something else?

Ben Casselman: There are three main theories, and they reflect very different views of the economy. The first theory, which is the optimistic one, is that the U.S. economy is just way stronger than anybody expected. For the last year or two, every economist was predicting a recession. But instead, hiring has stayed super strong, consumers keep spending, businesses are investing. The economy is booming. And in a booming economy, you expect interest rates to stay higher for longer because there are so many good investment opportunities.

Rachel Abrams: That sounds like good news! What's the second theory?

Ben Casselman: The second theory is the worrisome one: inflation is not truly dead, and the Fed is going to have to keep interest rates high for a very long time. We saw recent data showing inflation picking back up, largely driven by oil and energy prices. If inflation stays stuck at 3% or 4%, the Fed can't cut rates. And inflation is poison for bond investors. If you lock your money up for 10 years at 3% interest, but inflation is 4%, you're losing purchasing power every single year. So investors demand higher yields to protect against that inflation risk.

Rachel Abrams: And what's the third theory?

Ben Casselman: The third theory is simple supply and demand: the U.S. government is borrowing an astronomical amount of money, and there aren't enough buyers. The federal deficit is huge. The Treasury is issuing trillions of dollars in new debt to pay for government spending. At the same time, major buyers like the Federal Reserve are stepping back, and foreign buyers are slowing down. When you have a massive flood of new bonds hitting the market and not enough buyers, the price has to fall, and yields have to go up to entice investors to buy all that debt.

Rachel Abrams: When all three of those things come together, what does that actually mean for the ordinary person sitting at home?

Ben Casselman: It has immediate, painful consequences, and nowhere is that clearer than the housing market. Mortgage rates track the 10-year Treasury yield very closely. As Treasury yields have surged toward 5%, 30-year fixed mortgage rates have shot up to near 8%—the highest in 23 years. A couple of years ago, when mortgage rates were 3%, a monthly payment on a median-priced home might have been $1,500. At 8%, that same house with the same loan costs $2,800 or $3,000 a month in mortgage payments. That crushes affordability for regular people.

Rachel Abrams: It locks everyone out. Existing homeowners don't want to sell because they don't want to give up their 3% mortgage to take on an 8% mortgage, which freezes the whole market.

Ben Casselman: Exactly, the lock-in effect. And it extends beyond housing: credit card debt is more expensive, auto loans are more expensive, small business loans are more expensive. Companies that need to roll over existing debt now have to pay much higher interest, leaving less money for hiring and expansion. Over time, that slows the entire economy down.

Rachel Abrams: Ben, looking back over the last decade and a half—from the 2008 financial crisis through the pandemic—we grew used to essentially near-zero interest rates. Are we looking at a temporary blip, or is this a fundamental turning point?

Ben Casselman: More and more people are realizing that the post-2008 era of rock-bottom, near-zero interest rates was the historical anomaly, not the norm. If you look back to the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, 5% yields and higher interest rates were completely standard. The era of free money—fueled by hyper-globalization and emergency post-crisis policies—is likely over, and we are settling into a new normal.

Rachel Abrams: Which means governments, businesses, and regular households all have to adjust to a world where money actually costs something to borrow.

Ben Casselman: That's exactly right. Borrowing isn't free anymore, and every deficit, every budget, and every investment has to be weighed against real costs.

Rachel Abrams: Ben Casselman, thank you so much for breaking this down for us.

Ben Casselman: Thanks so much for having me.

Rachel Abrams: Here is what else you need to know today:

Investors are now looking towards the Federal Reserve, which is expected to make a decision on whether to increase short-term interest rates or hold them steady while assessing the impact of higher bond yields on the economy.

In tech and politics, President Trump called Nvidia's chief executive to complain that recent fears about AI were nothing more than a hoax.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.