A plunging stock market may make it painful to check your 401(k), but as investors found out this week it was when bonds started plunging (and yields, which move inversely to bond prices, starting spiking) that things got really bad. So bad, in fact, that Trump hit his pain threshold and announced a 90-day pause on most tariffs. Why are bond yields, of all things, so important? For retail investors, it's likely something they haven't paid much attention to in the past. But the 10-year Treasury yield is a benchmark that directly influences borrowing costs for all U.S. consumers, and when it heads in the wrong direction, that has major implications for the U.S. economy.
