Good morning. Props to anyone out there who rolled in to Wednesday with a fistful of Moderna shares, which more than doubled in price on news of its trial results for an experimental skin cancer vaccine. Another sliver of evidence that it’s not all about the AI trade. Props, too, if you had just bought the dip in long-term Treasuries, on which much more below. Tell us what you think of the further adventures of Scott Bessent at [email protected].

Calling all Unhedged superfans: Rob and I will be at the FT Weekend Festival in Kenwood House Gardens, London on September 5. Newsletter readers can get a 10 per cent discount on tickets with code FTNewsletters. If there was any serious doubt that the US administration is spooked by the rise and rise of borrowing costs, the latest market intervention from the House of Scott Bessent should put that to rest.

The message came through loud and clear yesterday, when the Treasury announced a huge ramp-up in buybacks of outstanding long-term US government debt. Buybacks in themselves are not unusual. But the House of Bessent said it would at least double them, in the 10- to 30-year section of the market, which, as this chart shows, amounts to about $5.7tn outstanding (not all of which is eligible for this operation). The buybacks, which will step up from September 9, are pretty substantial. As the Treasury said, the current maximum size of $2bn for each operation will step up to at least $4bn. Barclays reckons this represents a hefty 15 per cent reduction in long-end supply.

Operation Knock It Off has flushed out a lot of negative positions on Treasuries and pulled those yields down a fair amount. Analysts at Citi say this action is to control long-end yields and was not for market functioning purposes. Bessent’s latest curveball serves to underline the conclusion that I, and lots of people much smarter than me, came to after the late-July joint US-Japanese intervention to support the yen. For the US, getting on board on the yen, curbing the temptation for Japan to boost its currency with massive sales of Treasuries, selling euros instead of dollars to buy the yen, and lining up further support through FIMA rather than through Treasury sales all point to the main beneficiary of all this being the US bond market, not Japan. But there is a “but”, which is the dollar. Just as Treasury yields were falling fast yesterday, so was the buck.