An under-appreciated potential side effect of the Trump administration’s determination to eliminate America’s trade deficit is the read-across for capital flows.

In simple terms: If you reduce, let alone choke off entirely, USD-denominated surpluses, you’re very likely to reduce demand for USD-denominated assets.

That’s not especially complicated, but it gets short shrift. Here’s the trade deficit:

In March, the gap widened to a new record near $142 billion.

The chart’s a poignant reminder that when you set about slapping the whole of humanity with draconian trade levies in a quixotic bid to fix something which, contentious debates aside, isn’t actually broken, you’re likely to exacerbate the “problem,” at least in the very near-term, on the mother of all pull-forward effects.

Consumer goods imports for March rose by the most ever, driven by pharmaceuticals. There was evidence that importers were also rushing to get cars and business equipment before “Tariff Man” unilaterally declared everything more expensive.

The cost of servicing America’s debt is a political flashpoint, even as it’s a ridiculous debate from a philosophical perspective as long as the dollar’s the reserve currency. There are a number of ways you might go about capping interest outlays. You could, for example, reduce the debt. Or you might bully the central bank into cutting rates or buying at the long-end of the curve.

One thing you wouldn’t want to do if you were really concerned about debt servicing costs is disincentivize foreign demand for your bonds. But that’s exactly what Trump’s doing.

“The US last ran a trade surplus in 1975” and the persistence of deficits is “why the US is now protectionist,” BofA’s Michael Hartnett wrote, in his latest. “But the flipside of a big deficit was a big $540 billion of foreign inflows to US assets over the past five years,” he added.

The (ironic) implication is that the trade war may “threaten the funding of US [budget] deficits via higher bond yields,” Hartnett went on, noting that “nothing reverses US macro policy more quickly than the risk of >5% Treasury yields.” That, he suggested, is “why tariffs [may] fall in Q2.”