The buyers’ strike expands in bonds. Hello and welcome to the newsletter, a grab bag of daily content from the Odd Lots universe. Sometimes it’s us, Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, bringing you our thoughts on the most recent developments in markets, finance and the economy.

“T-bill and chill” had a moment a few years ago, when Fed rate hikes meant you could earn more than 5% simply by parking cash in short-term Treasury notes. Now, three-month t-bills are yielding 9 basis points more than SOFR OIS and the six-month is 13bps above. Per Samuel Earl at Barclays, “those represent the highest bill yields versus OIS this year, and they are now matching levels during the money market volatility of Q4 25.”

Investors have been shunning longer-term US Treasuries, and now it looks like they’re doing something similar at the short-end. Normally, around this time of year, you’d expect to see investors putting more cash into money market funds, but that’s not what’s been happening. This raises the question of whether the Federal Reserve might have to step in and buy t-bills via “reserve management purchases,” or RMPs.

It’s interesting timing, given Fed Chair Kevin Warsh has previously emphasized that short-term rates should be the central bank’s predominant monetary policy tool. It was also only last month that the Fed paused its RMPs for the first time since the program started. One to watch.