Bessent’s Last Stand: and Other Recent Rude Awakening Articles

by Stephan Kinsella on August 26, 2026

PFS Member Sean Ring’s Rude Awakening column is on fire lately: in August alone we have several excellent ones, including—

The Price of Money Just Went Up (Aug. 3, 2026)
The Hidden Diesel Tax (Aug. 4, 2026)
The Trap Door Bailout (Aug. 5, 2026)
The Magnet That Breaks China’s Grip (by Matt Badiali) (Aug. 7, 2026)
The $2 Million Fly Swatter (Aug. 10, 2026)
The $53 Billion Side Door (Aug. 11, 2026)
War Money Moved Early (Aug. 13, 2026)
The $54.6 Billion Bottleneck (Aug. 18, 2026)
The Empty Vault (Aug. 19, 2026)
Buy Now, Pay Later (August 20, 2026)
You Don’t Own Your Stocks (Aug. 21, 2026) (hint: you don’t own bitcoin either, at least not by libertarian principles.¹ Well, legally you do, but that’s not necessary a good thing)²
Second Harbor (August 25, 2026)

To highlight just a couple:

“The Man Who Cooled the World” (Aug. 24, 2026)

Living in Italy has taught me many things.

The food is better. The wine is cheaper. The bureaucracy isn’t so much a contact sport as a collision sport.

And air conditioning is treated like a vice.

Italians will warn you about the dreaded colpo d’aria, the “hit of air” that supposedly causes everything from stiff necks to pneumonia. A cold draft is a health hazard. A ceiling fan is a gamble. An AC unit set below 26C (that’s 78.8F, you imperial standard lovers!) is practically a death wish.

To be fair, in Northern Europe, you don’t really need AC. But in the South, it’s a must.

And yet, Europe just lived through another killer summer. The June heatwave claimed an estimated 20,000 lives across the continent. Only about 20% of European homes have air conditioning. In America, it’s over 90%.

Heat kills roughly 11 people per 100,000 in Europe. In the United States, it kills about 2.

“Bessent’s Last Stand” (Aug. 25, 2026)

June 25, 1876. Little Bighorn.

George Armstrong Custer looked down at an encampment and saw a fight he could win. His scouts saw something else. The village below was bigger than any of them had ever counted. Custer split his command anyway and charged.

The reinforcements he counted on never arrived.

Last week, current, and maybe for-not-much-longer, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent rode down his own hill, on live television.

The 30-year Treasury yield had just hit its highest level since 2007. The 10-year wasn’t far behind. The national debt had crossed $40 trillion the same week. And the bond market, the last honest critic left in Washington, was demanding real compensation to keep funding it all.

So Bessent charged.

The Three Escalations

I was so happy we got a former hedge fund manager as a Treasury Secretary. Now, not only do I think my enthusiasm was misplaced, I think the man is flat-out certifiable.

On August 19, two weeks after the quarterly refunding, when changes like this are supposed to be announced, the Treasury said it would at least double its buybacks of 10- to 30-year debt. The cap went from $2 billion per operation to at least $4 billion, running September 9 through November 4. It’s like shooting an elephant with a Tic Tac. But, boy, did it excite the metals and miners.

Yields fell for exactly one day. Then they reversed. Of course, they did!

So Bessent went on CNBC and escalated. The buybacks could top $4 billion per issue. He’d – get this! – “make a market” in the long bond. In his words, he has “a big toolkit.”

Yesterday brought the third escalation. Two senior Treasury officials floated tapping the Treasury General Account (TGA), the government’s $950 billion checking account at the Fed, to fund the buying.

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