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Some analysts blame what they're calling the"Trump trade." Although the polls are a tossup, the markets think Trump is going to win the presidency. Further, they think a second Trump term will worsen the already bad federal debt trend and bring higher inflation.

Understand that the markets don't have a political agenda. Bond investors could be wrong about the consequences of a Trump victory - as well as about the victory itself - but their forecasts aren't an expression of anti-Trump bias.

Their decisions to buy and sell bonds reflect their estimations of inflation. Creditors fear being repaid in devalued dollars. Both candidates have promised inflation-stoking tax cuts and handouts, but economists calculate that Trump has promised more .

The other explanation for bonds selling off is the economy. The Fed's September 18 rate cut reflected an economy that was barely creating 100,000 new jobs a month. Some analysts were predicting another half-point cut at the Fed's November meeting.

But in early October the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a 254,000 increase in jobs in September, well above the 12-month average, and BLS revised some of the earlier months upward. Meanwhile, the inflation rate in September continued its downward march toward the Fed's 2% target but didn't drop as much as analysts expected .

With those reports, a half-point November cut by the Fed looked less likely. One Fed official even said he was open to skipping a cut in November.

The November 1 report of only 12,000 more jobs in October seems likely to be written off as distorted by big storms and the Boeing strike.

Financial markets are forward-looking; they anticipate events. In anticipation of the Fed's September cut, investors had bought bonds, which drove bond yields down. In light of the reports showing a stronger economy and worse-than-expected inflation in September, investors' expectations changed. If the Fed wasn't going to lower rates as much or as fast as expected, markets had to adjust.

It's possible, of course, that the real answer is some combination of the Trump trade and expectations of future Fed rate moves. The expectations answer is more conventional. If investors were selling bonds in fear of higher deficits and inflation, you'd have to wonder - why now? Bond investors have ignored years of multi-trillion-dollar federal budget deficits.

If those deficits are now starting to make bond investors queasy, it would mark a return of what were called the"bond vigilantes." In the early years of the Clinton administration three decades ago, bond investors' concerns about federal spending drove 10-year note yields to 8% from 5.2% in a year.

The administration was forced to work with Congress on plans to rein in spending and, years later, even produced a budget surplus. That it had to be pushed by the markets to do so caused a Clinton advisor, James Carville, to say - famously - that, if he could be reincarnated as anything, it would be the bond market so he could intimidate everybody.