For the past week, President Trump has been urging calm — and with good reason. Far from chaos, the financial reaction to his tariff announcement has revealed something far more profound: the world still wants to do business with America, and Trump is calling the shots.
“I know what the hell I’m doing,” the president told Republicans on Tuesday, shrugging off media doomsaying and elite panic. “BE COOL!” he posted on Truth Social the next morning. “Everything is going to work out well.”
At 9:37 a.m. Wednesday, Trump doubled down, posting: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!”
He was right.
The market bounce came swiftly. Although President Trump’s announcement that some of the tariffs would be paused for 90 days got all the attention, the real fireworks began several minutes earlier, when the U.S. Treasury held its much-anticipated 10-year bond auction. Instead of panic or retreat, the auction showed overwhelming demand. Indirect buyers — including foreign central banks — lined up to purchase U.S. government debt.
In other words, far from turning against America, the world was signing up to support it.
Behind the scenes, that outcome wasn’t accidental. Trump administration officials had spent the previous days quietly assuring international partners that Trump’s trade strategy was not a lurch into chaos but a coordinated plan to end decades of economic exploitation by foreign powers — especially China. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Vice President J.D. Vance, and other members of the Trump economic team had been urging a structured approach that would isolate China while signaling to global markets and allies that the administration’s strategy was deliberate and focused.
“Virtually every country wants to negotiate,” Trump said Monday. The auction on Wednesday proved it. The buyers weren’t running from America. They were buying into it.
Later that day, Mr. Trump announced a 90-day pause for most countries while raising tariffs on China to 125 percent. It wasn’t a reversal — it was a signal that allies can work with the U.S. and adversaries would pay.
Earlier in the week, many on Wall Street believed that central banks were dumping Treasuries, causing yields to unexpectedly rise despite rising fears of a recession and a plunging stock market. Stock volatility and recession concerns would normally trigger a “flight to safety”—investors buying bonds—that would push up bond prices and force down bond yields. But with the U.S. imposing tariffs, perhaps this time it would be different, with global investors rejecting U.S. bonds as a sort of protest against the new tariffs, many on Wall Street speculated.
This created a lot of tension around Treasury’s auction of 10-year bonds on Wednesday. Some analysts warned that the auction could fail to attract buyers, resulting in a disorderly rise in yields. “Today’s Treasury Auction Could Make or Break the Bond Market,” a headline in Barron’s warned. There was talk that the Fed might have to step in with an emergency facility to buy Treasuries to restore order to the market.
Instead, the auction delivered a resounding vote of confidence and support, upending the narrative that foreign buyers were going on strike against U.S. government debt.
The bonds were sold at a yield of 4.435 percent, notably below the 4.465 percent level seen just before the auction began. That “stop-through” result, as it is known on Wall Street, signaled strong demand — the Treasury had no trouble selling the bonds without having to offer investors a premium above market rates.
One of the clearest signs of strength came from indirect buyers — a category that typically includes foreign central banks and global financial institutions — who snapped up 87.9 percent of the supply, far above the average of around 70 percent.
If foreign investors were trimming their Treasury holdings earlier in the week, the very strong auction results suggest that global institutions had reversed course and were now eager to hold U.S. debt.
Far from a “sell America” trade, the bond market just signaled a vote of confidence in Trump’s leadership and the strength of U.S. markets.
A senior bond trader on Wall Street told Breitbart News that Bessent played a key role in this pivot. His conversations with foreign leaders, especially in Asia and Europe, likely reassured investors that the U.S. debt is in steady hands — and that the trade realignment underway is not a tantrum but a strategy. More importantly, foreign investors — especially governments and central banks — appear to see buying Treasuries as a way of signaling their willingness to cooperate with U.S. efforts to reshape global trade.
“Turning away from the auction would have looked like a form of retaliation against the tariffs,” said the bond trader, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized by his employer to speak to journalists. “Instead of retaliating, they bought.”
Some media outlets claimed that market volatility forced Trump to pause. But the bond auction tells a very different story — of steady demand, falling yields, and growing confidence in the U.S. global leadership. And it signaled that many of the countries facing Trump’s reciprocal tariffs wanted to cut deals rather than engage in a trade war.
Trump’s decision to tap Bessent to lead tariff negotiations likely played a key role. As the man tasked with managing America’s debt, he has used both public reassurance and private diplomacy to stabilize the situation — even improve it.
At a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Bessent dismissed the idea that the bond market forced the White House’s hand. Instead, he hinted that the participation of global investors in Wednesday’s auction was a crucial step toward the pause in tariffs for non-retaliating countries.
“We actually had quite a good 10-year auction today,” he said, with a slight smile.
“Many of you in the media clearly missed the ‘Art of the Deal,’ you clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said. “You tried to say that the rest of the world would be moved closer to China, when in fact, we’ve seen the opposite effect. The entire world is calling the United States of America, not China, because they need our markets, they need our consumers, and they need this president in the Oval Office to talk to them, and that’s exactly why more than 75 countries have called.”
On Wednesday, the world didn’t run from Trump’s plan to reorient the global trading system—it lined up to invest in U.S. Treasuries.
