K-12 tax & SpendinG Climate: Bond Markets Don’t Bend. They Snap.

Pounts & Figures:

If you live in a place like I do that consistently taps the bond market for funding to cover deficit spending without any reform of that spending beware. By reform, I mean cutting spending because usually governments don’t find new revenue. Governments think they can tap the bond market for money with no end in sight. Like it’s a spigot they just turn on, or a money tree in the backyard they go and pick cash off of.
They are making a poor assumption. Corporate and Muni bond markets are not at all like US Treasury markets except for maybe the jargon used to trade them. US Treasury markets are very very liquid. Other bond markets not so much. The bid ask spread in the Treasury market can be as tight as 1/64th. That spread will have billions of dollars on each side of it waiting to be taken out. In short term interest rate markets like Eurodollars, they trade trillions a day in notional value with spreads as little as $6.25 wide.
Contrast that with corporate bonds or municipal bonds. Those spreads are miles wide and often it takes a couple of days to get a quote depending on how popular the bond is. I owned some water bonds from a county in Illinois and it wasn’t a snap to get out of them. If it would have been a US Treasury, I would have pushed a button on my phone.