"We shall fight on the Bloombergs"
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Paul Krugman's latest Substack echoes Winston Churchill's famous 1940 speech:
President Trump's remark about military intervention in the bond markets actually happened — here's a transcription in context:
Q: Did you direct Secretary Bessent to intervene in the bond market?
A: No. Not at all. No, he's a very capable man, he wanted to do it.
He's very good at it, he is a good touch,
very good natural touch for the bonds and interest and
uh he did that, yeah.
Q: The yields have come back up since then.
Have you talked to him about another type of intervention?
Is that something he will be doing?
A: We have many types of intervention. That's one.
The ultimate intervention is our military.
And uh if we have to use that we will. Yeah.
I imagine, or at least hope, that this was a joke.
The comments on Krugman's post include some nice puns: "Bonds away!", "Tranche warfare", "Does the arc of history bend towards the yield curve?", "Bond here, James Bond. Shaken, not stirred.", "Operation Desert Coupon ", "B-Day!", "Are we in bondage yet?", "There are no Risk Analysts in foxholes."
Update — Lots more puns on social media, e.g. "Yields will go nuclear!", "once the military intervenes, the bond market will say: 'Yield!'", "really does put the 'joint' in Joint Base Andrews.", "confusing 'traders' with 'traitors.'", "Occupy Wall Street 2.0", […]
And there are some quick AI-generated images like "The poster for 'Saving Private Equity'?" and "Monday morning at Goldman is gonna be 🔥", and even a a song ("Buy The Bonds. Or Else.")
Jerry Packard said,
August 22, 2026 @ 9:44 am
Good Humor. How about:
The K economy is becoming an L
The great concavity: Canada suspends trade talks with U.S., setting new 50% tariffs in motion.
David Marjanović said,
August 23, 2026 @ 9:34 am
Much more likely is that Trump heard "intervention" and riffed on the only meaning of that word he happens to know. See also: "asylum" > dastardly foreign governments are emptying their soul asylums and shipping the dangerous madmen into the US somehow.
Andrew Usher said,
August 23, 2026 @ 12:26 pm
I am quite certain that the expression "soul (sole?) asylum" does not exist in English. Yes, "asylum" alone can still mean 'mental institution', but not likely without suitable context, and I doubt Trump or anyone has ever claimed seriously that 'asylum seekers' are necessarily mentally ill.
Stephen Goranson said,
August 23, 2026 @ 3:17 pm
Whether or not Trump explicitly claimed all asylum seekers "necessarily" are mentally ill, he did claim that asylums were being emptied, and those people were sent to the US.
S Frankel said,
August 23, 2026 @ 3:24 pm
@Andrew Usher: "Soul Asylum" definitely exists in English, although not in that context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_Asylum
JPL said,
August 24, 2026 @ 10:34 pm
Krugman is here laughing at Trump, not laughing with him.
David Marjanović said,
August 27, 2026 @ 2:37 pm
…Fascinating. Soul asylum does not have a Wiktionary article and is not mentioned in the Wiktionary article on asylum, and the first ten pages of Google results for "soul asylum" -ai -band -vinyl -lyrics -runaway show nothing but the band. I have no idea where I got the term from, then, because the other languages I know have nothing like it and I didn't know the band existed. Maybe I saw the band's name somewhere…?
Andrew Usher said,
August 30, 2026 @ 2:50 pm
That seems the only possibility. Although that makes the obvious question of where the band's name came from, I have no information on that and there's probably no logical reason: in many cases bands just adopt names that sound good to them, it seems.
In any cases I was reacting to the fact that your comment about asylums seemed trollish, and a pointless dig at Trump, even though your first statement was probably the right answer i.e. Trump wasn't actually thinking at all.
David Marjanović said,
September 4, 2026 @ 1:43 pm
I do apologize for the misunderstanding, then. I meant to provide precedent of Trump knowing only one sense of a word and assuming it is the only one, no matter what absurd conclusions that leads him to.
Andrew Usher said,
September 6, 2026 @ 9:52 pm
I understand, and it might have been clear without the distracting 'soul asylum' mistake. I carefully avoided the implication of you being a troll.