As well as lack of demand for the new treasuries they issued. Basically, the dollar is no longer seen as a safe harbor in time of crisis.

oh here’s the content

A sale of 20-year U.S. government bonds saw weak demand Wednesday, pushing the Treasuries to new lows for the year as yields climbed.

The Treasury Department sold $16 billion of newly issued 20-year bonds at 1 p.m. Eastern. It’s routine for the Treasury Department to borrow to fund the government. This auction, however, saw heightened interest as investors worried that increased uncertainty about the U.S. economic policies would lead to less demand for the Treasuries. Their fears were spot on.

The auction saw investors accept a yield of 5.047% on the 20-year note, compared with the past six auctions’ average of 4.613%. It was also 0.011 percentage points higher than the yield seen before the bidding deadline. This was the first time the Treasury sold a 20-year note with a rate over 5% since October 2023. Back in the pandemic, it could sell its 20-year debt at 1.22%. Higher rates signal that demand is weak, as the Treasury has to entice investors with higher yields to buy U.S. debt.

Since the auction results, the 20-year Treasury’s yield jumped to its highest levels for the year at 5.103% on Wednesday. Higher yields mean lower bond prices. The 30-year yield was also trading at its highest point for the year at 5.071%.

To be sure, such market reactions for a 20-year bond are abnormal. The 20-year Treasury debt is long understood to be the awkward middle child of the bond market. It isn’t a natural security for investors to buy. Investors tend to prefer 10-year and 30-year debt, which are more liquid.

Regular quarterly issues of 20-year Treasury bonds were eliminated in 1986, but former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin restarted them five years ago, during the first Trump administration. Yields on the 20-year notes are also always oddly higher those of 30-year bonds—an anomaly because longer maturities usually have higher yields.

“I never write on the 20-year auction because it’s sort of this low liquidity, lost child Treasury note where not many play around this maturity playground,” wrote Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at Bleakley Financial Group. “But, in light of seeing Treasuries again getting yippy, I’ll comment today because the auction was weak and bond yields across the curve are at the highs of the day in response.”

The poor auction comes at a troubling time. Bond investors’ fiscal worries have intensified as a Republican Congress progresses toward a new tax bill that could add $3.3 trillion to the national debt through 2034. More debt can threaten a government’s ability to pay it all back—even though the U.S. has a pristine track record.

Last week, long-term U.S. government debt lost its perfect Aaa credit rating from Moody’s, which cited successive administrations’ failures to deal with rising U.S. debt and deficits in its downgrade.

https://archive.ph/WbogI

indeed

Oh yeah completely agree there. The video touches on the fact that family-owned conglomerates run the place and directly benefit from these societal issues, maintaining a system that serves their interests, but doesn’t really pull on that thread to get to the bottom of the problem which, as you say, lies in capitalist relations.

I’m never going to be ceased to be amazed how people who have the most superficial understanding of a subject will invariably hold the strongest views on it.

Exactly, there’s massive state level investment directed towards closing the gap, and it’s only a matter of time at this point.

Can’t be far off, and will likely dominate the world the way Chinese EVs and solar panels do today once production ramps up.

ultras will ultra

It’s a self fulfilling prophecy worthy of a classical Greek tragedy.

I wrote about this here, China catching up to the west is itself an indication that it is advancing at a faster pace.

https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/chinas-tech-surge-reshaping-the-global

I’m saying that CPC already took anti-worker neoliberal measures like raising the retirement age therefore it should not be trusted to not take further anti-worker moves like enabling automation for the sake of profits and growth.

Equating raising retirement age with neoliberalism is an interesting take. Seems to me the decision was based on the material conditions in China.

They cheered on Deepseek even though AI is bad.

That’s just a pure reactionary position.

China is trying to boost consumption because their neoliberal advisors think this is the solution and the party happily accepts because there are no Marxists economists in positions of power, period.

That’s just pure nonsense I’m afraid. Can recommend reading a couple of books on the subject to educate yourself. Both do a great job explaining in detail and with references the Marxist position of the party and behind policies being taken.

• https://redletterspp.com/products/chinas-great-road
• https://redletterspp.com/products/the-east-is-still-red

The fact that you think China is neoliberal is frankly incredible. You seem to equate raising consumption with neoliberalism which is an absurd statement to make. China is a developing nation, and consumption is rising because standard of living is rising.

It’s always easier to do stuff the second time around when you already know what the rough approach is even if you don’t know the details.

What are you even trying to say here, also what population crisis?

• https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2108900118
• https://asiatimes.com/2023/07/chinas-demographic-doomsayers-cite-the-wrong-data/

As @Nacarbac@hexbear.net notes, the article not saying that it’s all going to be humanoid robots. That said, everything I noted above still applies. General purpose robots are versatile, and they’re going to be useful in many different context. Think of it this way, why do we make generic computer chips instead of making specialized chips for different kinds of tasks which could be much more optimized. We do that for some cases of course, but the backbone of computing is a generic chip that you can produce at scale and use for all kinds of tasks. Same logic applies here.

💯

There are a lot of significant advantages to a single general-purpose platform versus designing custom robots for every task. You can use the same group of robots and assign them different jobs as needed. These robots can also adapt to new tasks and workflows as they emerge. Additionally, you can use the same set of replacement parts that work on any robot. Production costs are also much lower since you won’t need lots of factories for different robot types.

Exactly, this is a huge game changer and using mothership platforms like this extends the range of these weapons by a huge margin. China is also actively applying AI to drone tech as well meaning that it won’t be possible to jam them either.

It’s interesting to see how quickly China is able to learn from the conflict in Ukraine and develop new weapons platforms based on that in under three years. Nothing comparable is possible in US.

it looks like the actual name in Chinese is Nine Heavens (九天) likely a reference to 九天玄女 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiutian_Xuannü