It wasn’t so long ago when everybody who’s anybody feigned nostalgia for a time when the bond market served a check on “bad” policy and the “worst” impulses of politicians.

Modern day bards told (sometimes tall) tales of yesteryear’s bond vigilantes, whose exploits were exalted in overwrought terms — what, after all, could be more noble than colluding to drive up borrowing costs for governments as punishment for the perception of fiscal largesse?

But, as Bruce Wayne will attest, hero vigilantism is a risky career choice. It won’t always be clear, for example, why the person you beat to death last night while dressed as a flying mammal deserved it, and even if you can explain it later, some citizens might ask annoying questions. Questions like, “Should law enforcement be the purview of a deeply disturbed individual who prowls around at night in a bulletproof Halloween costume looking for fist fights?” In the event there’s confusion around your motives or questions about your commitment to acting selflessly in the interest of the polity, public opinion could shift.

In August, there was a sense among some market participants that Treasurys deserved to sell off — surely a government that cares so little about fiscal rectitude and even less about the bad optics of intractable gridlock and violent partisan rancor is a government that should pay more to borrow. That goes double when the same government is asking the market to absorb more supply at a time when the central bank is hamstrung by inflation realities in its capacity to underwrite new issuance through an arm’s length Ponzi scheme.

Throw in the well-socialized idea that fiscal largesse, stubborn inflation and related macro shifts might’ve pushed up the equilibrium rate for the economy, not to mention a fractious geopolitical environment that likewise argues for structurally higher inflation, and you’re left with a very compelling case for higher yields.

The term premium, which turned positive for the first time in years late last month, was up to 22bps as of Tuesday from negative 63bps on July 31.

“For the time being, the bulk of the repricing appears to have limited contagion, although that can only be the case if the breakdown in Treasurys is truly considered to be an isolated incident that lacks macroeconomic ramifications,” BMO’s Ian Lyngen and Ben Jeffery remarked, adding that they’re “skeptical… even if the move is being attributed to the long-awaited return of term premium.”

I’m skeptical too. In the US 10-year, we’re talking about the benchmark of all benchmarks, after all. Everything in the world is, in one way or another, priced off benchmark US Treasury yields. And the dramatic move higher in those yields can surely be considered a macro event.

I suppose you could quibble with that latter characterization, but if you make a list of the factors behind the term premium’s return to positive territory (for example), that list looks pretty macro-oriented to me. Sociopolitical dynamics might be idiosyncratic in the sense that they’re country-specific, but they’re still more macro than micro, particularly when the society and political system in question is America’s.

“The likeliest causes [of the bond selloff] appear to be a combination of expectations of better US growth and concern that huge federal deficits are pressuring investors’ capacity to absorb so much debt,” Wall Street Journal “Fed whisperer” Nick Timiraos wrote Wednesday. “The lack of an obvious culprit for the latest rise in longer-dated yields suggests that the term premium is rising,” he went on. “Even if inflation is under control, borrowers will have to pay more than before because investors want extra compensation for the risks associated with locking up their money for longer periods.”

Nobody wants to say this, but it could be that investors are becoming nervous about the prospects of a crisis of government in Washington, or at least about the high odds that partisan intransigence inside the Beltway and a seemingly unbridgeable ideological chasm among the populace, will invariably result in more hostage taking around the debt limit and other key funding and fiscal deadlines. The odds of a default accident — or even a deliberate default — have never been higher.

To Lyngen’s point about spillover (i.e., “macroeconomic ramifications”), there’d be something odd about the idea of a macro-driven repricing in the most important asset on Earth occurring in a vacuum with no macro consequences. Unrealized losses for holders of Treasurys are enormous at this point. Whether those losses need to be realized depends on the investor, but for many, that red ink, temporary or not, is an albatross.

10-year Treasury yields have just seen their third-largest six-month increase in at least two decades, coming not long after the largest such increase.

For the economy, higher long-end yields are a tightening impulse, particularly rising real yields. The dollar’s inexorable rally (which goes hand in hand with higher real rates) likewise tightens financial conditions. So do lower stock prices. And stocks have seemingly had enough of the bond selloff.

Needless to say, there are a lot of “behind the scenes” (if you will) flow dynamics in play. “The convexity-hedging mortgage space keeps getting lit on fire, all while well-socialized payers continue taking their toll on the swaptions dealer community, further contributing to the feedback loop which is exacerbating the damage,” Nomura’s Charlie McElligott wrote Wednesday, adding that “the interplay between the violent selloff in rates [is] forcing CTD switches for owners of UST futures, where enormous coupon differentials are extending DV01 significantly for asset manager net longs in some of these contracts, which dictates the need to shed more duration on the lows.” For what it’s worth, I mentioned that latter dynamic last week. I also flagged it in the Weekly+ via a short excerpt from TD’s Gennadiy Goldberg.

Most of this ends up being self-fulfilling, of course. “It drives further downside demand [and] more futures selling ‘in the hole’ to adjust duration hedges, all of which acts like yet another form of synthetic short gamma and negative convexity into the selloff,” McElligott remarked, in the same note.

To be completely honest, it feels, at times, like something else is going on behind the scenes, where that means “someone” might be selling in size. And I’m not talking about Japan trying to tap the brakes on yen depreciation. It’s tempting to blame rolling capitulation from underwater longs, shorts pressing the issue, CTAs following the trend, hedging flows and so on, but it’s been quite a while since I’ve seen duration have this much trouble getting traction. Any traction. There was some relief on Wednesday in and around the big downside ADP miss, but even in a rally, the long-end underperformed.

Whatever the case, market participants struggling to assign blame for the never-ending selloff at the long-end of the US Treasury curve seem increasingly restless. To the extent the rout is attributable to “vigilante justice,” so to speak, at least one citizen has seen enough. “The bond vigilantes have seized control of global markets,” Marcus Ashworth complained, in an Op-Ed for Bloomberg. “Until either the economic data weakens significantly or a sudden crisis explodes, it’s solely up to the Fed to assess how far it lets the rise in US bond yields go.”

I’m compelled to quote James Carville, who famously said, of rising yields as a constraint: “I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”