The bond market is getting restless. What rising yields, $40 trillion in debt, AI spending, and Scott Bessent reveal about the price of money.

Bill Clinton famously exploded during a 1993 economic meeting: “You mean to tell me that the success of the program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of f***ing bond traders?”

More than three decades later, the bond traders are once again getting everyone’s attention.

My guest on this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, economist Dean Baker, questions some of the conventional explanations for what’s happening — starting with the alarm surrounding America’s $40 trillion debt. “If we have a strong, growing economy,” Baker argues, “our debt’s not a problem.”

Michael Moritz, a former journalist, became one of Silicon Valley’s most successful investors — and a philanthropist who has quietly backed the Booker Prize and San Francisco journalism. Yet he never escaped the terror of his family’s past. On this recent California Sun podcast, the longtime Sequoia Capital leader talks about his new book, “Ausländer,” which traces how his family’s flight from Nazi Germany echoes in the lives of descendants who never lived it.

Nathaniel Philbrick, a National Book Award winner and Pulitzer finalist, recasts the Gold Rush as the moment where America learned to embrace greed and live at warp speed. His new book, “The Rush,” and in our recent California Sun conversation, he explores instant wealth, immigration, slavery, and technological upheaval, then follows that same restless impulse from the Gold Rush through railroads and agriculture to Silicon Valley and the artificial intelligence boom.