Bill Dudley, Columnist

Look Out America, Here Come the Bond Vigilantes

If US officials don’t do something about the government’s fiscal problems, the bond market will.

March 13, 2023 at 10:00 AM UTC

Bill Dudley is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he is a member of Coinbase Global's advisory council.

Rough justice.
Photographer: Daniel Roland/AFP/Getty Images

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As recently as the early 1990s, America’s leaders cared a lot about how bond investors would react to their decisions. James Carville, a political strategist for Bill Clinton, famously said that he’d like to be reincarnated as the bond market, because “you can intimidate everybody.”

Since then, they’ve largely stopped caring. That’s unfortunate: The bond vigilantes could soon be coming for them.