Investors are paying close attention to the world’s safest assets

Regular and bmopredictable. That has been the golden rule of Treasury issuance for 40 years. America’s fiscal branch once funded itself with “tactical” bond sales. Officials would survey market participants and issue debt in response. But this process proved highly disruptive to financial activity. So in 1982 they adopted a new approach: a regular schedule of issuance would be followed, communicated long in advance. Treasury officials now think that, by reducing overall borrowing costs, this strategy has saved taxpayers a fortune.As a part of this regularly scheduled programme the Treasury has, for decades, released a “quarterly refunding announcement” in which it lays out its plans for the next three months. This is not generally a hotly anticipated event, being precisely the kind of wonkish release that seldom attracts wider interest. But on November 1st the announcement was pretty much all that Wall Street cared about. Ian Lyngen of Capital Markets, an investment bank, declared this a “unique moment in market history”, because the refunding announcement was more important than the meeting of the Federal Reserve, which took place later the same day. “All that matters at this moment is supply.”