The US long bond cheapened again on Monday, and I gotta tell you: The optics are getting pretty dicey for Scott Bessent.

I realize I’ve spilled quite a lot of digital ink on this over the past week, but it’s slowly morphing into a significant PR problem.

30-year US yields were 5.31% to start the week. That was the highest since 2007, and it’s more bad press for a Treasury Department which auctioned 30-year debt at the highest yield in nearly a quarter century last week.

There’s the chart. Again: The optics aren’t great, particularly in the context of US economic data that’s rolling over into — dare I suggest it given what the sharp increase in 30-year reals ostensibly says about the bright prospects for the US economy — a nascent growth scare.

“Duration remains with no friends, unable to cease this bear steepening,” Nomura’s Charlie McElligott said. “With [Kevin] Warsh not talking, the market drifts further down the path of least resistance.”

Note that the front-end’s anchored by diminishing (I’d call them de minimis) odds of a Fed hike in September. That means the curve pivots around longer tenors.

“The curve has become a directional trade with any bearishness translating into a steepening bias,” BMO’s Ian Lyngen remarked on Monday afternoon in the US, reiterating that this is all reals.

The two-session selloff is “surely a function of the looming 30-year TIPS auction,” he went on, but added that breakevens’ somnolence is nevertheless notable given questions about Warsh’s credibility and the sudden shift in the policy zeitgeist which accompanied the bungled July press conference.

“A less hawkish Fed stance should translate into higher forward inflation expectations [so] the fact that 30-year breakevens remain <225bps reinforces the relevance of the cheapening in 30-year nominals,” Lyngen said.

The figure below, from Lyngen’s Monday afternoon note, gives you some historical context for the current move above 5%. Plainly, “historical” just means over the past 25 or so years, given that 30-year yields were always above 5% prior to 1998.

See how the red line (the current episode) follows the average path (blue dashed line) for 40 sessions then abruptly inflects? That inflection point coincides with the collapse of the Iran ceasefire.

Obviously, this year’s heavy corporate slate is a contributing factor. It’s possible the narrative — i.e., the notion that AI-related high-grade issuance to fund data centers will pressure yields higher as Treasury competes with the hyper-scalers for duration buyers — is now so well socialized that it’s become a bearish factor on its own.

Whatever the case, this isn’t a falling knife anyone seems inclined to catch. Bloomberg on Monday quoted Barclays head of rates, Anshul Pradhan. The US long end won’t get a bid absent “some combination of a downside fiscal surprise, slower AI-related issuance, a shift in Treasury’s issuance strategy and a sustained run of soft activity data,” he said.