'The house doesn't win every hand': Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent dismisses bond market backlash

Joseph Zeballos-RoigTue, October 6, 2026 at 12:00 PM UTC

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has expressed no regret about daring financial markets to bet against his currency and bond market interventions.

“The house doesn’t win every hand,” Bessent told Axios. “The house plays percentages.”

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Bessent was referring to a comment he made in September when the former hedge fund manager stated “I am the house now” to demonstrate his ability to set the terms of engagement on Wall Street as a senior government official.

“I am the house now,” he said at the time, later stating: “You can bet against me if you want.”

Bessent argues to ‘trust the process’ as bond market rout worsens

In late August, the Treasury Department expanded a buyback program for longer-dated bonds to stabilize the U.S. bond market. But it has failed to quell the bond market backlash with investors fretting about inflation entrenching itself across the economy, along with the U.S.’s $40 trillion national debt.

Bond yields have hovered near multidecade highs in recent weeks. Yet the Trump administration has shown little public unease about the state of the bond market.

“What I’ve learned that, everyone in the market knows you don’t win every hand, but you win over time,” Bessent told Axios. “Everyone knows I’m a big basketball fan — big fan of John Wooten, big fan of Dean Smith. And how do they win? You trust the process and you put a good process in place.”

On Monday afternoon, the 10-year Treasury was trading at 5.34%, its highest level since 2002. The 30-year Treasury reached 5.70%, also its highest point since 2002.

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Climbing yields demonstrate that the bond rout isn’t ending anytime soon. These rising yields will translate into higher borrowing costs for Americans, since they affect lending rates for mortgages, autos and more.

Read More: Here’s the average income of Americans by age in 2026. Are you keeping up or falling behind?

Bessent, though, observed that investors aren’t necessarily swapping U.S. bonds for foreign ones. British, French and Japanese bonds are experiencing similar sell-offs, with financial analysts attributing it to pervasive concern among investors about their respective governments’ failure to slash their public debts.

“We are not seeing people sell treasuries to buy German bonds or Japanese bonds,” Bessent said. “And like I said, I can’t control the bond market. What I can do is try to get people to slow down and think.”

‘We’re not an activist Treasury’

Bessent also pointed to the Trump administration’s $20 billion currency swap effort to prop up the Argentine peso last year as a successful example of its decisive approach, since the U.S. government was able to generate a profit from it.

“We’re not an activist Treasury,” Bessent said. “But what we have done, what I have done with President Trump’s blessing, is we believe that economic security is national security.”

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Source: “AOL Money”