If you ask BofA’s Michael Hartnett, this is no time to get comfortable.

“We use any rallies in risk assets in the coming months to get defensive and position for hard landing,” he wrote, in the latest installment of his popular weekly “Flow Show” series.

As always, Hartnett’s latest was entertaining and engaging, even if the bearish undertones vis-à-vis equities feel a bit tired by now (i.e., 40% later on the Nasdaq 100).

He correctly assessed that subjective hard landing odds have probably receded to around 20% these days. Although Bloomberg consensus still puts recession odds for the US economy at around 60% over the next 12 months, a recession isn’t necessarily the same thing as a hard landing and Bloomberg consensus doesn’t really capture the real-time zeitgeist in my opinion.

To the extent market participants have faded a hard landing, their confidence in the US economy’s capacity to avert a bad outcome may be tested going forward by the pernicious, self-feeding combination of a stronger dollar, higher yields and higher oil.

That looks increasingly like a self-fulfilling prophecy: The crude rally biases inflation higher, which is seen keeping the Fed on its toes, a more hawkish Fed is bullish for the dollar, and so on. Maybe greenback strength eventually breaks (or at least brakes) crude. We’ll see.

“Higher-for-longer oil, USD, yields and tighter financial conditions remain the September / October risk for risk assets [and] raise the hard landing probability in the next six months,” Hartnett wrote. If there’s a negative payrolls print this fall that serves to ease financial conditions via lower yields and a weaker dollar (on Fed easing bets), Hartnett would sell any accompanying rally.

There’s “no doubt” that a negative NFP print or “another credit event” could send yields tumbling, he conceded. But, he went on, “the bond vigilantes” still see a bloated US federal budget deficit, surging US government debt and elevated government expenditures globally for public sector investment, infrastructure, rearmament and net zero commitments.

They (the bond vigilantes) also worry that the three billion people poised to vote in elections across countries which together represent more than three quarters of global equity market cap, might vote for “more fiscal excess,” which could be funded by central banks, Hartnett warned.

That’s all supposed to be foreboding, but… well, suffice to say a lot of voters across the developed world don’t give a damn what any “bond vigilantes” want. While you could plausibly suggest that two years of runaway inflation across advanced economies on the heels of massive, central bank-enabled fiscal stimulus was proof that even government-run Ponzi schemes have their limits, the problem at the end of the day is that the opinion of the bond market is irrelevant when the streets are on fire and the peasants are storming the castle.

Insisting the pitchfork-wielding villagers should stay poor for their own good (which is effectively what we’re asking when we scream about wage-price spirals and point to the inflationary consequences of government transfers and other kinds of redistribution) isn’t likely to go over well. Not when they’re massed outside the gates, waving torches. And not when there are more of them than there are of us.

Hartnett does get it, by the way. The bond market might be “discount[ing] fiscal policy panic” tied to concerns that politicians will spend “to avert social and political unrest,” he wrote, describing the mechanism by which recessions and joblessness might cause “higher not lower long-term government bond yields.”

But, again, he seems unable (or unwilling) to connect the final dot: In an extreme version of the scenario Hartnett posits, questions about where bond yields might end up will be subjugated to more pressing concerns. Concerns like: Is Brioni flame-resistant?