Hedge fund legend slams Treasury's bond buybacks

• He argues that there were no signs of the kind of freeze-up in bond market liquidity that might justify a temporary intervention.
• Druckenmiller, with partner George Soros, famously made a fortune betting against the Bank of England's currency peg in 1992. Bessent was a young trader with the fund at the time.

What they're saying: Noting that longer-term yields fell following the Treasury action but then reversed course, Druckenmiller argued in the op-ed that the "market's verdict was swift and correct: This wasn't liquidity management, it was price management — and a mistake far larger than $4 billion suggests."

• "There were no failed auctions, no dealer balance-sheet seizure, no forced unwinds, nothing resembling Treasurys in March 2020 or U.K. gilts in September 2022, the sort of genuine dysfunctional episodes that justify official action."
• "Volatility was contained, and trading was orderly — not a malfunction but the machine doing its job," he (or the em-dash-loving AI Druckenmiller acknowledges using) wrote.

The intrigue: Federal Reserve chairman Kevin Warsh worked with Druckenmiller for the last decade, and one needn't be a wild-eyed conspiracist to suspect that Warsh's views could be closer to Druckenmiller's than to Bessent's.

• Warsh and the Fed have been silent on the matter thus far.