On Monday, The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy published a piece called “The Humbling Of Scott Bessent.”

In it, Cassidy walked readers back through last week’s bungled attempt to arrest the selloff at the long-end of the US Treasury curve, where a buyer pool comprised of price-sensitive (as opposed to price-agnostic) investors has “run out of patience with sovereign risk,” as SocGen’s Wei Yao put it.

“As yields rose again late last week, Bessent told reporters that they would come back down as traders came to realize that ‘we are focusing on fiscal consolidation’ [but] this statement flew in the face of reality,” Cassidy wrote, reminding Americans that it was just a few short months ago when The White House floated a budget proposing a 40% increase in funding for Pete Hegseth’s “War Department.”

“As the mid-terms approach, [Donald] Trump is boasting about all the tax cuts that Congress pushed through last year in his ‘Big Beautiful Bill,'” Cassidy went on. “There’s a term for raising spending and cutting taxes when the economy is chugging along, but it’s not ‘fiscal consolidation’ — it’s ‘fiscal recklessness.'”

Indeed. And it’s clear that exactly no one’s buying what Bessent’s selling, either figuratively (his narrative about “very poor” liquidity for the long bond is largely false) or literally (if people were champing at the bit to load up on US duration, yields would be lower).

As I suggested in this week’s macro preview, the best thing Bessent can do right now is go silent for a while. Instead, he’s going to outline a new package of sanctions targeting Iran and, as Cassidy alluded to, float some manner of cost savings push presumably with an assist from Russ Vought.

Let’s be clear: There’s nothing Bessent and Vought can say to “fix” the facts on the ground. In the same set of remarks cited by Cassidy, Bessent suggested markets are detached from the “fundamentals,” but the reality’s illustrated below.

As the figure, from BMO’s US rates team, shows, America’s debt servicing bill is the highest in nearly a quarter century as a share of total federal outlays, and interest costs are very nearly back to the post-pandemic highs as a share of total federal revenue.

“For historical context, interest costs represented an average of 12.2% of expenditures between 2000-2020,” BMO’s Ian Lyngen remarked, adding that at nearly 21% of total federal revenues, America’s debt-servicing bill is well above the 15% post-dot-com average and “just off the highest since 1997.”

Mind the specifics, folks. Total US government receipts hit a record just two quarters ago. So, as Lyngen went on to note, the increase in the ratio of debt servicing costs to federal revenue is “largely a function of skyrocketing interest expenses.”