MoneySpider Weekly — 23 August 2026

This week the US Treasury tried something new — doubling its own bond-buyback programme specifically to hold down long-term borrowing costs. For a day it worked; by Friday the 10-year and 30-year were both back above where they’d started, in the same week America’s national debt crossed $40 trillion for the first time. That’s this week’s signal: Yield Instability, escalated to High confidence. Underneath it, the strain moved rather than eased — jobless claims actually ticked down, but Walmart posted its weakest US sales growth in over six years, UK unemployment hit its highest reading in over a year, and the US-Iran ceasefire understanding lapsed with no new deal, in the same week a vessel was struck and a sailor killed in the Strait of Hormuz.