Felix Salmon Writes on finance and markets, now as a senior writer at Bloomberg, after years as chief financial correspondent at Axios, and is the author of The Phoenix Econ...

“This is my standard hobby horse when it comes to market reporting. The number one true thing that everyone can always say about the market every day is the market moved and we don't know why. … 99% of the time, there is not an obvious reason why the market moved, but everyone kind of has this human need for a simple narrative explanation.”

Slate Money · October 2026

Treasury yields fell unexpectedly, and analysts and journalists put it down to a "flight to safety." Salmon argues that story was made up after the fact. Elizabeth Spiers pushes back that a move can have several causes and still be partly explained.

Slate Money · 2026-10-17 Listen to the episode → More from Felix Salmon →

Transcript

Slate Money Around 17:59 into the episode

Felix Salmon

…was that treasury yields went down, surprisingly. Everyone was surprised. And then a whole bunch of journalists went around saying, why did this happen? And no one could come up with a single reason. So everyone just said flight to safety because that was the only thing they could think of.

Elizabeth Spiers

Analysts said that. Yeah,

Felix Salmon

that's what analysts, analysts and journalists are basically saying. This is my standard hobby horse when it comes to market reporting. The number one true thing that everyone can always say about the market every day is the market moved and we don't know why. No one ever really, there is no simple narrative explanation for why the market moved, almost never. Once in a blue moon, there's an obvious reason why the market moved. 99% of the time, there is not an obvious reason why the market moved, but everyone kind of has this human need for a simple narrative explanation. And so they rack their brains for like what could conceivably have caused this decline in yields. And the one thing they glom onto is, well, maybe there was nervousness about data center interest rates and that caused a flight to safety. And you're like, you know what? It's a narrative. It has explanatory. I don't think that

Elizabeth Spiers

the fact that it's multifactorial means that everything is simplified down to a single cause. I think you can state with some confidence that it was at least partially a reaction to that without saying it's the only mover. No,

Felix Salmon

I don't think you can say that with any confidence at all because there's no way of demonstrating. You can never prove that. It's just an explanation. And normally you find these explanations in the stock market where like the stock moves and people try and come up with some random reason why it…

Elizabeth Spiers

think it was stupid. I think they're placed afraid of causality, but now we're now getting existential. I challenge

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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