How The Crisis Nearly Blew Up One Of The World’s Safest Trades

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Every week, hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway take you on a not-so-random walk through hot topics in markets, finance, and economics.

In normal times, U.S. Treasuries are the ultimate safe haven. They are highly liquid and guaranteed to pay out. So when people want to hide out during periods of economic and financial market volatility, you can typically count on there being a strong bid for them. But in the last couple of weeks, the volatility has been so extreme, and the flight-to-cash so severe, that the market stopped behaving as normal. And popular trades involving arbing Treasuries and Treasury bond futures started to fail. On today’s episode, we speak with Josh Younger, a managing director at JPMorgan, who explains how and why it started to fall apart.

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