If you know one thing about bonds, know this: A sharp sell-off is shaking the bond market, and it has big implications for both the economy and your pocketbook.
To understand why the sell-off matters, it helps to understand how bond markets work — and why they are sounding alarm bells about the U.S. government's record-shattering debt levels and the path for inflation.
Here's a simple and handy guide to make sense of what's going on.
How do bond markets actually work?
Bonds are essentially like loans. The U.S. government — like just about any other government in the world — needs to borrow money to afford all its spending, including spending on federal employee salaries and Pentagon projects.
So to raise money, the U.S. government regularly sells bonds to a wide range of investors, from banks to other countries to individual people. (Companies also sell bonds; those are called corporate bonds.)
And just like banks charge you an interest rate when lending you money to use for a credit card or when offering you a mortgage, investors expect to be paid interest in exchange for lending their money to the U.S. government. In market talk, that interest rate paid by the government is called the bond yield.
Bonds can fluctuate in value, and that affects the amount of interest the government has to pay on that bond. It's a simple rule: Bond prices and yields move in opposite directions from each other.
The reason is that if bond prices fall — like they are now — investors demand to be paid more in interest as additional compensation. And vice versa. If bond prices are rising, investors are fine getting less in interest since they are holding bonds that are appreciating in value.
It's not too different from how a financial firm could decide to charge you a higher interest rate for a loan if it's worried about your ability to pay it back — or to lower your interest rate if it feels you are a good customer who's always on top of their bills.
Why are bond prices falling?
In a very simplistic way, bond prices are falling these days because investors are mainly concerned about two things. First, that rising inflation is making the bonds they are holding worth less.
And second, that the U.S. government, under successive presidents, has had a habit of spending more money than it collects in taxes. Imagine suffering a pay cut without trimming back your expenses.
One of President Trump's first major legislative victories in his second term, for example, was signing a megabill that extended tax cuts that were implemented during his first administration — while also raising spending in areas such as border security.
As a result of actions by Trump and past presidents, the U.S. debt pile is growing: In fact, on Wednesday the U.S. Treasury Department said federal debt hit a record-shattering $40 trillion for the first time.
That's a major reason bond prices are falling. The yield on the 30-year government bond, for example, hit its highest level since 2007 this week. Most people don't actually believe the U.S. is about to go broke and find itself unable to pay back investors, but investors are worried.
I'm not a Wall Street investor. Why should I care?
Bonds are critical to the economy because they influence interest rates that people pay on many things.
What matters most is the bond yield. Effectively, the interest rates paid by the government for its bonds become a useful benchmark for banks and other financial firms when they decide how much to charge for their own loans to customers.
That's why hikes in bond yields can reverberate across the economy.
Mortgage rates, for example, are influenced by the yields paid by government bonds (though there are other factors as well). And at a time when bond yields are rising, it's not surprising to see mortgage rates also rise. Last week, the average rate on a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage hit 6.67%, nearly the highest level in a year, according to Freddie Mac.
It's not just mortgage rates. Rising bond yields can also push up interest rates on credit cards, car loans — and all kinds of borrowing costs across the economy.
And, obviously, rising bond yields impact how much the government itself has to pay in interest. The slumping bond market is sending yields sharply higher, so much so that the U.S. is now paying $3 billion in interest per day. In fact, interest payments are now the government's second-biggest expense, trailing only Social Security.
If bond markets are so worried about the economy, why are stocks at record highs?
That has been a big talking point on Wall Street.
But keep in mind that these are two completely different markets. Bond investors care, primarily, about whether they'll get paid back. Hence, they demand higher interest rates when they start to get worried.
But stock investors tend to make a more straight-up bet on corporate profits. Investors who buy Apple shares are betting, for example, that the company will sell more iPhones and iPads and that the stock price will rise.
And right now, despite rising borrowing costs, companies are making some pretty decent profits, signaling that the economy may be doing well nonetheless.
In other words, bond investors and stock investors tend to see things differently. Tax cuts are a good example of this divide.
Generally, bond investors don't like tax cuts. It means the government will probably earn less and struggle more to pay back investors. But for stock investors, tax cuts are good. They can juice up spending by consumers or companies.
But only to a point. If signs emerge showing that inflation or rising borrowing costs are starting to tamp down economic growth, by slowing down consumer spending for example, expect stock investors to join bond investors in worrying about the economy — and seeing trouble ahead.
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