Bill Clinton’s former political strategist James Carville famously said he’d like to be reincarnated as the bond market because “you can intimidate everybody”. As long as governments have debts, bond markets will have the power to bully them. There was a time during Ireland’s post-2008 crash descent that we looked warily at the government’s 10-year bond yield, in effect the country’s credit rating, wondering if we maintained the confidence of investors. [...]