It used to be the bond market that bullied politicians and policymakers into pivots. Now, according to one popular strategist, it’s equities.

I’m reluctant to give short shrift to the bond vigilantes of yore given their decisive role in forcing Liz Truss from office in 2022 and, let’s not forget, compelling Donald Trump’s infamous April 9, 2025, tariff “pause” (“The bond market was getting the yips, but I wasn’t,” Trump famously told TIME).

But I’ll be the first to concede that decision makers in Washington became more sensitive to stock prices post-GFC, a psychological inclination that persists today in the so-called “Fed put” and in Trump’s famous penchant for backing away from maximalist trade and foreign policy demands in the face of stock market drawdowns.

With that in mind, the annotated figure below, From BofA’s Michael Hartnett, is a worth a mention.

When you plot the S&P 500’s deviation from its 200-DMA, the Iran war selloff isn’t pronounced relative to any of the past two decades’ major financial quakes, and yet we got a ceasefire (“fragile” though it is).

Hartnett quoted Carville, of course: “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 want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”

“It’s the stock market now, James,” Hartnett said. “Markets stop panicking when policymakers start panicking, and policy easing has quickly reversed Wall Street bears and corrections since the GFC.”

Stocks, he went on, are simply “too big to fail” in the US. Most investors understand that intuitively, even if they can’t pen an essay on why the vaunted “wealth effect”‘s critical for an economy that lives and dies by consumer spending.

Inflows to equity funds, at nearly $275 billion through April 8, are on track for a(nother) record year, Hartnett added.