The U.S. Treasury will repurchase up to $6 billion in long-term government bonds on Thursday.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury announced that it will repurchase up to $6 billion of longer-term government bonds on Thursday, marking the first such operation since Secretary Bessent expanded the buyback program, aiming to curb the recent rise in borrowing costs. The maximum size of this buyback is three times the initial $2 billion announced to investors at the beginning of August. The original plan was canceled in a surprise announcement on August 19, when the Treasury said it would “at least double” the scale of such operations. After the announcement, U.S. Treasury bonds with maturities of 20 to 30 years, which are the target of Thursday's buyback, continued their decline. The yield on 30-year U.S. Treasuries rose intraday to 5.38%, close to the early-month high of about 5.40%, and the highest level since 2007. Responding to criticism that this move amounted to market intervention and cannot address fundamental fiscal challenges, Bessent defended the expansion of bond buybacks by stating that action was taken because he believes market prices have “deviated” from equilibrium. The Institute of International Finance (IIF) warned on Wednesday that attempting to address underlying debt dynamics through “financial engineering” cannot solve the problem, and that interventions such as purchasing securities on the secondary market “may bring temporary relief but cannot resolve the structural factors driving debt growth.”