Treasury bond yields have crept up as Wall Street wonders if either party is capable of improving the nation’s fiscal trajectory.
As congressional Republicans advanced their megabill in recent months, many fiscal hawks in the party figured they had a powerful force on their side: wary titans of finance who had started sending powerful signals that their appetite for purchasing U.S. debt was not, in fact, endless.
Turns out Wall Street was barely a bump in the road.
In passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last week, GOP leaders blew past a host of warnings to potentially add several trillion dollars of additional borrowing — brushing off concerns that they were missing a late opportunity to put the nation on a more sustainable fiscal trajectory in favor of piling on expensive new tax cuts.
The whole episode was a stark display of how short-term rewards and Trump’s demands outweighed any anxieties about long-term calamity — even from a constituency as powerful as Wall Street, whose major players are reliable financiers for politicians of both parties.
Some heavyweights like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and billionaire investor Ray Dalio emerged as clarion voices for fiscal rectitude. Many others kept quiet on macroeconomic issues and advocated instead for the extension of tax cuts to promote economic growth — and, frequently, their own personal welfare.