I’ve already commented on this video below once, but some takes on it from ‘sophisticates’ demand another. Yes, it’s funny to quip, “Bomb bond holders?” I laughed. But the U.S. is slipping global hegemon because it won WW2 by force (yes: with others); then built a benign, inclusive world architecture for 1/3 of us when others might have nuked a few capital cities and taken over the world; then won the Cold War, via the threat, and use, of force (yes: with others); then lobbied for a utopian neoliberal world architecture that was never going to work, as I argued over two decades ago, which has weakened it. We didn’t get to where we were pre-Trump via neoliberalism; we got there via *power*: neoliberalism was a villa built on violently cleared ‘jungle’, as Polanyi put it decades ago - and one that didn’t learn anything about the dangerous climate, flora, nor fauna there. If you really think the market treats powerless pacifists and nuclear-armed states as true equals when push comes to shove, I have a bridge to sell you. (And it goes nowhere.) There are a staggering number of Schmitt’s “Sovereign is he who decides the exception” examples out there already on various scales in various geographies. (As well as central banks buying their own bonds and this being treated as “sensible centrist technocracy”.) And sovereignty starts with power: sorry those thinking it’s solely to do with paperwork and courts. When Trump implies the U.S. military effectively backs the bond market, he’s not wrong. If you think that military can OR can’t project U.S. power globally as it once did, that matters VASTLY for market dynamics. Just don’t ask bond analysts to have any idea about it; they have as much of a clue there as generals do about bonds. Which speaks to why the U.S. is openly —and as predicted— going back to the pursuit of *power*, and a new economic and financial architecture to match, via economic statecraft that can join those dots. That has already seen massive intervention in parts of the economy. That will logically see massive intervention in markets —as we saw from 2008 to no real end economically, or politically looking at the current U.S. Watch and see what happens to the Fed and the Treasury. That will logically include the U.S. physically threatening others via action or INaction (“Nice NATO you have there…pity if anything happened to it…”), If you can’t see this you are either very kind; and/or very ideological; and/or not very well read; and/or the kind of person who got their lunch money taken at school and who now lives in a nice area where that doesn’t happen - but where your kids might be learning things about liberalism and capitalism that echo Leninism’s view of the world. It’s a depressing world where Schmitt is relevant again. But he is. Separate but related point: as I said to @izakaminska re: our global system crumbling, an inverse 70s is the 007-ties: spies, guns, war, world-shattering plots. Yet ‘James Bond’s “next chapter” needs to make 007 “relevant” to modern audiences, says Amazon MGM Studios boss’. If you think that’s not seeing the forest (or box office) for the trees, neither is thinking bond markets just happen without tanks, bombs, and Bond.