One month after the bond market went ballistic, with the 10-year Treasury yield breaching 4.7% and the 30-year Treasury yield skyrocketing to 5.17%, the market is now well and truly imploding. The benchmark 10-year hasn’t come down, and the 30-year has catapulted toward 5.3%, hitting its highest level since before the Great Recession.The financial fracas prompted Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to announce on Wednesday that the Treasury would “at least” double buybacks of long-term bonds to stave off the sell-off. The strategy worked — for less than 12 hours. By Thursday morning, the 30-year yield had fallen, then risen some 10-odd basis points again.Bessent is correctly panicking because roughly a third of our $32 trillion in publicly held debt is maturing in the next 12 months, meaning that roughly $10 trillion worth of debt that was financed an average of six years ago is maturing into a market where interest rates are 300 to 400 basis points higher than they were in 2020. But his tool kit is limited. In the case of Treasury buybacks, Bessent is taking out new debt to buy back old debt at higher interest rates, in the hope that the aggregate effect will depress interest rates enough to justify the trade through lower borrowing costs for that $10-ish trillion that’s maturing this year.