U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s more active debt-management strategy is challenging the long-standing predictability of the Treasury market. After announcing a bond buyback program he called a "Treasury twist" the previous Monday, attention has shifted to the Treasury Department’s quarterly refunding announcement on Nov. 4. Strategists at firms including Bank of America and Deutsche Bank say the decision is unusually difficult to predict for the $31 trillion U.S. Treasury market. The prevailing view is that future borrowing may increasingly be funded through short-term Treasury bills and shorter-maturity notes, while buybacks are expanded to ease pressure on longer-term yields. Some analysts now see a rising possibility that long-term bond auction sizes could be cut directly. Bessent has ruled out changes to the regular auction schedule for now and said the current timetable would remain in place at least until the next refunding announcement, but market expectations have already shifted. Analysts also note that the Treasury’s latest guidance referred to potential "changes" in future coupon and floating-rate note sales, rather than "increases," leaving more room to reduce long-end issuance. Any larger buyback would need to be financed through additional issuance, most likely bills, or cash in the Treasury General Account, since the Treasury cannot create money to fund purchases as the Federal Reserve can. Morgan Stanley estimates that the account could provide $80 billion to $200 billion for buybacks. Strategists expect the eventual market-moving decision to be how the Treasury shortens the weighted-average maturity of its debt. Citi has delayed its forecast for larger auctions to 2028 and raised the tail risk that the Treasury could ultimately eliminate 20-year bonds, which were reintroduced in 2020 by Steven Mnuchin, the first Treasury secretary of the Trump administration. Directly cutting long-term issuance would be difficult because other maturities would have to absorb the borrowing, and Kevin Flanagan of WisdomTree said the approach could be viewed as market manipulation and backfire.