One of Bill Clinton’s top advisers memorably said that he would like to be reincarnated as the bond market “because you can intimidate everyone”. But in recent years, the most powerful fixed-income market of all has been scaring its own regulators.

The $26.5tn US Treasury market is the biggest and most liquid in the world and Treasury securities are held by investors and central banks across the globe. The market is the mechanism by which the Federal Reserve executes monetary policy and through which the US government borrows. Yields on Treasuries are the risk-free rate against which assets around the world are priced.

But growing problems could threaten the asset’s supremacy in the financial world. On three occasions in the past decade, crises have precipitated a dysfunction in the market. The 2019 repo crisis and the March 2020 market meltdown required emergency intervention from the Federal Reserve and the New York Fed.